A Monumental Kazuo Shiraga
Created for the celebrated 8th Gutai exhibition staged in Kyoto in August 1959, Takao (estimate: €1,800,000-2,500,000) is a truly remarkable work in terms of its impressive dimensions and date of creation. Just as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were revolutionizing the lines typical of Western painting, an equally significant approach was being developed on the other side of the globe by Gutai, a group of Japanese artists.

Takao was one of the first works by Shiraga executed on canvas, a nobler and above all more enduring medium than paper. It illustrates the artist’s total commitment: “wanted to paint as though I was going to war. To paint until I was exhausted – until I collapsed.” Among the other extraordinary works on offer at auction, we can also mention a singular polyptych by Joan Mitchell (À Tribord, estimate: €800,000-1,200,000), a major painting by Pierre Soulages from the early 1960s (Peinture 65 x 92 cm, 26 octobre 1961, estimate: €1,000,000-1,500,000) and a historic piece, Untitled, by Keith Haring, the leading figure of New York counterculture (estimate: €500,000-700,000).