SOTHEBY'S EVENING AUCTION

20th Century Italian & Contemporary Art

SUPERMODEL JERRY HALL'S COLLECTION

I was lucky enough to be invited to attend Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction on Friday, 15 October, 2010, which coincides with the Frieze Art Fair in London. The sale will present 40 artworks that are estimated to realize in excess of £10 million.

ANDY WARHOL WITH JERRY HALL

In addition to the outstanding pieces by leading artists such as Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach in the auction from the Collection of Jerry Hall, the world-famous American supermodel and actress.

JERRY HALL, 1997

Lucien Freud

Estimate £30,000-40,000

The sale will also feature important works by established artists such as Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder and Andreas Gursky, as well as pieces by a younger generation of artists including Bansky, Elizabeth Peyton and Ahmed Alsoudani, whose artworks have never before been offered at auction.

PYONGYANG IV, 2007

Andreas Gursky

Estimate £500,000-700,000

Executed by the artist in 2007 and from an edition of 7, the work is one of a series of five images that Gursky made on this subject following his 2007 visit to North Korea. The work examines the same formal themes of surface ornament and pattern that pervade many of his best works, but in an entirely different corner of our globalize society; North Korea, the last outpost of communist dictatorship. The festival, held annually to commemorate the birth of North Korea's former leader, Kim Il Sung, is recognized as the largest event of its kind in the world and is the showpiece of the country's dictator, Kim Jong Il. In this painstakingly choreographed spectacle, tens of thousands of gymnasts, individually hand picked for their skill, execute with mechanical precision a sequence of synchronized moves which radiate waves of energy around the Rungrado May Day Stadium, the largest stadium of its kind in the world. In the background, thirty thousand strictly disciplined school children in white attire hold up sheets of paper of a different color at the appointed time to create a succession of background images, each child an individual tile in a monumental human mosaic. To avoid any potential political gloss, Gursky's photograph consciously avoids depicting portraits of Kim Il Sung, Korean slogans or propagandistic images of the happy proletariat which, in the course of the spectacle, variously appear on the human screen in the background. Instead, Gursky's camera focuses on the abstract patterns that underpin this event.

DIAMOND DUST SHOES, 1980

Andy Warhol

Estimate 1,300,000-1,600,000

The sale will also feature two of Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) most iconic works: Diamond Dust Shoes from 1980 and Flowers from 1965. The acrylic, silkscreen ink and diamond dust on canvas Diamond Dust Shoes is the most impressive work of this spectacular series ever to be offered for public sale in recent times. For his entire career and life Andy Warhol was obsessed with shoes, and these high-heeled icons represent all the transformative promises of glamour and attraction proposed by 20th-century fashion. Sparkling and glittering, the inherent qualities of diamond dust make a direct reference to movie star glamour, high fashion fame and money.

UNTITLED, 2003

(Orange Butterfly Green MG 03)

Mark Grotjahn

Estimate £350,000-450,000

A further auction highlight is Mark Grotjahn’s (b. 1968) oil on canvas which is a captivating display of the perspectival reorientation and sumptuous colour immersion that has made this artist one of the most exciting painters working in America today. While the formative paintings of his early career were heavily dependent on text and derived much of their conceptual weight from home-made signs of the sort found in shop windows and consisting of different graphics or varying point size and font type, in the late 1990s he developed geometric paintings with multiple and independent vanishing points usually with three horizon lines in a single canvas. The present work is an early and outstanding paragon of this body of works, and typifies the most important themes of method and concept of his best work.

THE NAZIS, 1998

Piotr Uklanski

Estimate 3400,000-£600,000

Also being offered for sale is Polish artist Piotr Uklanski’s (b. 1969) The Nazis, which consists of 164 chromogenic, black and white and colour photographs and was created in 1998. Number 5 of an edition of 10, it is Uklanski's most renowned and significant work to date and affords an encyclopedic survey of the wildly divergent cinematic interpretations and treatments of the history of war in the 20th century. From the determinedly epic to the effusively sentimental; the overtly heroic to the outright comic, this extraordinary document of and response to 20th- century filmmaking issues an incredibly powerful analysis of the conflicting perspectives of directors, producers, actors, cinematographers and stylists that compiled this canon of "War Films" for more than six decades. In its truly monumental scale and the brilliantly glossy chromatic terms of its manufacture, The Nazis lucidly and succinctly reveals the dependence upon film in later 20th-century western societies to inform our emotional and psychological responses to the Past.

I will be working the ticketing counter on Friday night and will watch the auction in the standing room after everyone is seated. I’m so excited! I know that just being asked to work the event is a testament to my hard work at Sotheby’s so far!