A wellspring of outstanding worksby artists ranging from Alexej Jawlensky and Egon Schiele to Heinz Mack and Emilio Vedovawill be on offer during Dorotheum’s major auction week formodern and contemporary art, the Contemporary Week at Palais Dorotheum in Vienna (22–28 May 2024). Exquisite jewellery and wristwatches go on auction in turn on 23 and 28 May.

Thematically perfect for the spring auctions is Mario Schifano’s experimental (extra)large-format En Plein Air. Quadro per la primavera (En Plein Air: a canvas for the spring), which is to be presented at the Contemporary Art auction on 23 May 2024. The artist filters the theme of historical landscape through a pop-impressionist iconography, thereby transporting viewers to a type of postmodern Eden – a televised paradise (as the screen-like edges of the scene remind us) and an Elysium in which both nature and culture beckon in the direction of spectacle and commerce (estimate €400,000 – 600,000).

Like Schifano, Emilo Vedova was also influenced by the contemporary American art of the time. Indeed, both Italians spent time in the States. Of the series of paintings created by Vedova during his 15-year stay, De America 1976-1977 is probably the most significant. The auction presents the second of these large-format canvases – visibly tremulous with energy and inspired by the Abstract Expressionism of Franz Kline or Willem de Kooning (€170,000 – 250,000).

Light is the one invariable traversing the oeuvre of the German ZERO artist Heinz Mack: be it the spectral colours of light, which he painterly takes apart and recomposes, as in Red Painting from 2005 (€80,000 – 120,000), or be it the iridescent surface textures palpable in the light screen Das Meer (€55,000 – 75,000). With this latter work, executed on a fine mesh of aluminium threads stretched between two towering plexiglass panes, Mack would have anticipated, as early as 1972, our current photovoltaic solar modules.

In the legendary year 1968, one special drawing was made by the now art world royalty Gerhard Richter. It just so happens that it bears testimony, too, to an artist friendship. It is a portrait of his friend and studio-mate at the time, Günther Uecker – captured in semi-profile from the back, much like the photorealist ‘Betty’ of Richter’s most iconic portrait. This was the time when Richter was creating his grey photograph-based paintings and this work, with its clearly visible grids, evinces in part grey brushstrokes on the back of Uecker's head (€200,000 – 300,000). On auction: an early poetic work by Günther Uecker, a nail relief from 1958 called ‘Symmetrical Structure’ (€80,000 – 120,000).

Arnulf Rainer's early Braune Übermalung from 1957, shown once during his 1989 retrospective at MOMA New York, is also an outstanding piece (€120,000 – 200,000). The doyen of Austrian post-war art created this extensive body of work, the overpaintings, from the 1950s onwards as part of a process he describes as follows: “Out of dissatisfaction, I kept correcting the pictures until they started getting darker and darker. The ‘over-paintings’ developed out of this process without any particular concepts,” says Rainer about Rainer. The series was created in search for calm beyond the gestural, in exploring the ground, the colour, the edges.

The brilliant writer Franz Kafka, whose death anniversary marks its 100th year, is one of the figures portrayed in the ‘Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century’. Andy Warhol created this screenprint series in an edition of 200 in 1980, at the suggestion of his gallery owner. Other portraits include Sarah Bernhard, Sigmund Freud, and Gertrude Stein. This is a rare complete series by the legendary Pop artist (€400,000 – 600,000).

Works by Antoni Tàpies, Carla Accardi, Manolo Valdés, Christo, Victor Vasarely, Tony Cragg, Jonas Burgert, Herbert Brandl, Hubert Scheibl, Hermann Nitsch and Maria Lassnig are also on offer.

Multi-layered

The Modern art auction on 22 May 2024 will feature Silene, a multi-layered portrait of a woman from the 1930s. It comes from the Transparency period of the stylistically experimental Spanish-French artist Francis Picabia and captivates with its surrealistic superimposition of figurative elements. The title of the picture is also open to interpretation. The term ‘Silene’ is employed in the academe as designation for the ‘Proserpinus proserpina’ butterfly, that proverbial by-light-bewitched crepuscular moth. In Greek mythology, on the other hand, a ‘silen’ is a creature not unlike a satyr (€200,000 – 300,000).

Alexej Jawlensky is counted among themost eminent protagonists of Expressionism. He was active in the circle of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), the artist communityfounded by Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Jawlensky was forced to leave Germany at the beginning of the First World War. During his Swiss exile by Lake Geneva, he would time and time again try to capture the view from his window in countless variations: reducing trees and bushes to ever-recurrent sparse smudges of colour and to abstract forms. The auction includes a large variation (Große Variation: Grüner Schimmer) in which the linen substrate of the painting can be glimpsed through the oils (€160,000 – 250,000).

Pencil drawings by Gustav Klimt belong to the highlights of the auction. This includes especially detailed studies for the paintings ‘Water Snakes II’ (Half-nude lying on her stomach to the right, €80,000 – 120,000) and ‘Judith II’ (Seated figure from the front, 1908, €120,000 – 200,000). Another title not infrequently associated with this latter painting is ‘Salome’ and what links the portrayed woman to the femme fatale are ‘above all the flowing veils, alluding as it were to Salome's famous dance of veils’. So writes Klimt specialist Marian Bisanz-Prakken in the catalogue and continues: ‘In this casually posed seated figure whose facial expressions seem to vaguely hint at decadence, Klimt has found the perfect balance between assured lightness and formal discipline. This masterpiece is grounded in the absolute intensity of linear differentiation.’ By way of reminder, powerful and minimalistically precise are the strokes exacted by Egon Schiele, who captured Two Women in black chalk in 1918, the year of his death (€180,000 – 240,000).

Other illustrious names to watch out for: Alfons Walde, Carl Moll, Max Oppenheimer, Edward Cucuel.

Italian sophistication, French chic & Swiss precision

The auctions of fine jewellery and exclusive watches on 23 and 28 May 2024 offer notable provenance as well as high craftsmanship from renowned jewellery makers such as Chantecler, Bulgari, Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels. Equally notable is the list of names represented at the auction of watches: Rolex, Patek Philippe, Jaeger-LeCoultre and A. Lange & Söhne. (For details see press release.)