VIENNA.- Modern and contemporary art, alongside exquisite jewels and timepieces, will take centre stage at Dorotheum’s Contemporary Week major autumn auctions in Vienna from 18 to 21 November 2025, followed by the Editions sale on 3 December.

Opening with drawings by Gustav Klimt and a gouache by Egon Schiele, the Modern Art sale on 18 November 2025 features a wide range of works, including the painting ‘Couple sur coq rouge’ by Marc Chagall from the 1970s (estimate € 300,000 – 400,000).

Schiele’s Crouching Female Nude (1917), from the penultimate year of his life, marks the beginning of a new, intense creative phase. During this period, the artist’s focus shifted away from the expressionist tension of earlier years towards the human body as a formal phenomenon. This museum-quality work, formerly in the Lederer Collection and later restituted, is estimated at €1.8 – 2.5 million (see booklet). Schiele’s stylistic transformation is evident when compared with the pencil drawing Woman on Knees and Elbows from three years earlier (€180,000 – 250,000).

The auction will also feature less typically metaphysical yet markedly surreal works by Giorgio de Chirico from the 1930s, including a double horse portrait, a recurring motif in his oeuvre symbolically rooted in mythology (€600,000 – 800,000). In “Sole e luna sulla spiaggia”, de Chirico unites classical memory and modern pictorial poetry: beneath a theatrically charged sky, ancient architectural fragments rise, while the sun, moon, and stars appear as mysterious surrealist props upon the vastness of a beach landscape (€150,000 – 200,000).

Unique

With his paintings of snow-covered Tyrolean winter landscapes, Alfons Walde made art and tourism history alike. “Maukalm” holds a special place: it was a commission for his friend Max Otto Faller, who expressly requested that the motif be painted only once — a promise Walde faithfully kept (€260,000 – 380,000).

The auction further includes works by Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, Oskar Schlemmer, August Macke, Gabriele Münter, Carl Moll, and Conrad Felixmüller, among others.

To the Square

A study from the iconic series “Homage to the Square” by Josef Albers, the former Bauhaus master and subtle theorist of colour who had a major influence on US painting, will be up for auction. In this series, the artist explores the interactions of chromatic planes within concentric squares (€240,000 – 340,000). Albers’ “Heavy + Bright Under Veil” (1964) is one of the key lots in the Contemporary Art sale on 19 November 2025.

The Czech artist Zdeněk Sýkora was among the first worldwide to develop pictorial compositions using a computer, beginning in the early 1960s. The present auction features one of his key works, Lines No. 109, from 1993 (€200,000 – 300,000).

From 1973 comes a painting by Pierre Alechinsky, in which painterly and graphic elements contrast and complement one another. The work exemplifies the CoBrA member’s aspiration to reveal the unconscious, primal, and unrestrained (€90,000 – 140,000). The life-size figure by leading British sculptor Antony Gormley recalls a pixelated 3D form. Gormley conceives the human body as an interface with the world, through which he explores the relationship between space, others, and self (€280,000 – 380,000).

Among the Austrian artists, significant works by Martha Jungwirth, Arnulf Rainer, Hermann Nitsch, Wolfgang Hollegha, and Erwin Wurm dominate the selection. Three outstanding large-scale neo-expressive paintings by Herbert Brandl enrich the offering. His atmospheric colour fields oscillate between abstraction and figuration; the artist, who passed away this year at the age of 67, described his engagement with nature, the capturing of mood and light, as an “inner process” (€50,000 – 70,000; €60,000 – 80,000; €90,000 – 150,000).

Additional highlights include works by Andy Warhol, Jean Tinguely, Stephan Balkenhol, Imi Knoebel, Rudolf Stingel, Mikuláš Medek, Tony Cragg, and Leoncillo Leonardi.