LONDON.- Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction will be held on 25 June, part of ‘20th Century at Christie’s’, a series of auctions taking place from 17 to 26 June 2019. The auction will be led by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night) (1984, estimate: £7,500,000-11,000,000). Further highlights include Jean Dubuffet’s Cérémonie (Ceremony) (1961, estimate: £7,000,000-10,000,000), one of only nine paintings by Dubuffet from his ‘Paris Circus’ series over two metres in scale, of which three are in museum collections, and Francis Bacon’s ‘Man at a Washbasin’ (1954, estimate: £5,000,000-7,000,000) from the height of his existential blue period. Representing those at the cutting edge of contemporary art practice, works by Cecily Brown, René Daniëls, Dana Schutz, Tschabalala Self, Amy Sillman, Kara Walker, Jonas Wood and Rose Wylie will also be offered. The works will be on view in London from 21 to 25 June 2019.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night)
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night) was created in 1984, a year of considerable significance for the artist. The previous summer, the artist moved into a loft space owned by Andy Warhol, and the two artists made their first collaborative works in silkscreen and paint shortly afterwards. The present work brings together text, icons and human figures amid a brilliant colour-field of magenta, yellow and emerald green, its composition dominated by two griot heads. Basquiat’s griots, their features limned here in electric white and green on black, show the influence of West African idols – many bearing the same distinctive, elliptical eyes. The work has remained in the same private collection for 25 years.

Jean Dubuffet
Jean Dubuffet’s Cérémonie (Ceremony) has been held
in the same private collection for 30 years. It offers a kaleidoscopic portrait
of cosmopolitan life, capturing the newfound joie de vivre that swept Paris in the early 1960s. Upon a black ground, lit with streaks of red and blue impasto, eight characters spring to life, wrapped in wild linear scrawl. Cafetière II (1965, estimate: £550,000-750,000), originally owned by the celebrated American publisher and art collector Harry N. Abrams, is a beguiling still-life from Dubuffet’s ‘l’Hourloupe’ series of work that was defined by its puzzle-like configuration of crosshatched red, white and blue cells.

Francis Bacon
In Francis Bacon’s ‘Man at a Washbasin’, a nude male figure – based on Bacon’s lover at the time, Peter Lacy
– is suspended in a void of rich, midnight blue. His skin glows in white and lavender tones, as he bends over, plunging his hands into a washbasin which is described in glinting, crystalline white rays. Bacon had met Peter Lacy, a former fighter pilot, in 1952 at the Colony Room in Soho.

René Daniëls
Confronting the viewer with an inscrutable stare, Borsalino (1981, estimate: £80,000-120,000) is an absorbing portrait by René Daniëls. Utterly mesmerised, the pale rapt subject is bathed in an air of disquieting solitude, situated against an abstract backdrop of raw red and blue strokes. One of the most celebrated Dutch painters of his generation, Daniëls emerged during the late 1970s, at a time when figurative painting had again become prominent.

Kara Walker
Spanning over three metres in width, Four Idioms on Negro Art #4: Primitivism (2015, estimate: £200,000-300,000) is a vivid and monumental work by Kara Walker. Walker, whose new site-specific work for Tate’s Turbine Hall will be unveiled in October 2019, is best known for her mural-sized installations of black paper cut-outs which viscerally dramatize and deconstruct racial and sexual stereotypes; the genteel ‘mock-antique’ appearance of these silhouettes is jarringly at odds with their incendiary content.

Contemporary Artists
Unfolding across a vast double canvas over three metres wide, Black Stork (2012, estimate: £100,000-150,000) is a bold and playful work by Rose Wylie. To the left, the titular bird is limned in strident strokes of black, framed by green topiary; it lifts one leg as if preparing to fly. To the right, as if enacting the liftoff, two schematic avian forms fly beyond a cone-shaped grey mountain. Tschabalala Self’s Out of Body (2015, estimate: £40,000-60,000) is an exquisite example of the artist’s pioneering multi-media practice. Combining oil paint with swathes of patterned fabric, the artist explores notions relating to the black female body, creating characters and tableaux that resonate with her own experience. Diet 7Up Frimkess Pot (2016, estimate: £1,200,000-1,800,000) is a monumental example of Jonas Wood’s celebrated pot paintings, which are largely based on ceramics in his personal collection. His interest in pottery was first sparked by his wife, the ceramicist Shio Kusaka, leading him to explore the work of other practitioners. Home Birth (2016, estimate: £300,000-500,000) is a bold, self-portrait by Dana Schutz combining raw, visceral figuration with sharp abstract geometries. It epitomises the fragmented painterly language through which Schutz attempts to capture the complexities of human experience. Amy Sillman’s large-scale canvas Cliff I (2006, estimate: £120,000-180,000) speaks powerfully of our subjective and sensational relationship to the world around us.

The Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Auction will take place on 26 June 2019, featuring 138 works. It will be led by Alex Katz’s Ada with White Dress (1958, estimate: £450,000-550,000), a seminal early portrait of Katz’s wife and muse, which was painted the year after the couple met and held in the artist’s personal collection for over two decades. These works will be shown alongside the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction from 21 to 25 June 2019. The Post-War and Contemporary Art June Season will also include Xhibition, an exhibition in association with Galería Javier López & Fer Francés, that explores the relevance and versatility of the sign `X´ – or cross, in the work of Antoni Tàpies, highlighted by Gran creu negra (1990). The exhibition will be displayed in the St James’s galleries at Christie’s, King Street from 21 June to 19 July 2019.