BRIDGET RILEY’s Midi from 1983 sold with flying colours for £1.8 million / $2.4 million / €2.1 million (est. £1.2-1.8 million) in tonight’s sale. With works by Riley only rarely coming to auction, the painting sparked a bidding battle between four bidders. The sale of Midi precedes a major retrospective of the artist’s oeuvre at the Hayward Gallery, London in October 2019.

An auction record was set for TOYIN OJIH ODUTOLA’s Selective Histories from 2016, which achieved £250,000 / $329,475 / €289,501 (est. £100,000-150,000), in her evening auction debut. The artist has received outstanding critical acclaim in recent years, participating in exhibitions at various institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. The Museum of Modern Art in New York recently acquired five of her works. Tonight’s record is one of three others set by Sotheby’s this year for Nigerian artists, alongside those for Nijideka Akunyili Crosby and Yinka Shonibare.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS’ landmark Torso, Self-Portrait (1963) achieved a strong sale result fetching £1.8 million / $2.4 million / €2.1 million (est. £1-1.5 million). The first time a work of this subject and form has been offered at auction, Torso, Self-Portrait is the only marble and freestanding iteration of this highly consequential sculpture, which started life as a wall-hanging plaster and burlap original that today resides in the MoMA collection.

CINDY SHERMAN’s Untitled Film Still #21 (1978) sold for £615,000 / $810,508/ €712,172 (est. £300,000-500,000), having remained in the same collection since the 1980s. Arguably the most famous image from Sherman’s film still series, the sale of the work precedes a major retrospective of the artist’s work at the National Portrait Gallery in London this June.

ADDITIONAL NOTABLE RESULTS:

ADRIAN GHENIE’s unmitigated Duchamp’s Funeral I from 2009, exceeded its high estimate achieving £4.3 million / $5.7 million / €5 million (est. £2.5-3.5 million), four times the price it sold for at auction in 2014.  The work contends with one of the artist’s most significant thematic engagements: the vast influence of Marcel Duchamp and Dadaism on the canon of art history. Ghenie is to be the subject of two major institutional shows this year.

MARTIN KIPPENBERGER’s Lantern for Documenta IX – a pivotal example of the artist’s acclaimed pseudo self-portraits – sold for £2.2 million / $2.9 million / €2.5 million (est. £1.8-2.5 million) - an auction record for a sculpture by Kippenberger. Conceived in 1992 upon the occasion of Documenta IX, Kippenberger, who had not been invited to exhibit, published a poster featuring the present work installed outside the venue in a pose of exaggerated tristesse with a dropping tear; as if sad it could not be involved. Editions of the poster are held in the permanent collections at the Tate in London and MoMA, New York.

ALBERT OEHLEN’s Die Badenden (The Bathers), the largest painting by Oehlen to have appeared at auction saw competitive bidding from 3 phone bidders, before making a splash at £2.3 million / $3 million / €2.7 million (est. £1,000,000-1,500,000).
Our sales continue tomorrow with the Contemporary Art Day Sale, with an estimate of £14.6-20.1 million / $18.3-26 million. This week’s sales follow stellar results for our Contemporary Curated sale in New York last week, which achieved $36.8 million – the highest ever total for the Sotheby’s series.

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