LONDON, ENGLAND.- Sotheby’s forthcoming Evening Sale of Contemporary Art in London will be held on Wednesday, February 7, 2007. The sale will be a rich showcase of Contemporary Art from the past 50 years, with works by artists active from the 1950s to the present day. Highlights include works by leading names such as Richter, Bacon, Warhol, Lichtenstein and Basquiat. With a pre-sale estimate of £28.5 – 39.3 million, this will be the highest value sale of Contemporary Art ever held at Sotheby’s in London.

Gerhard Richter (born 1932) first began working on his Abstraktes Bild series in the mid-1970s. In the series Richter took the pillars of abstraction – colour, gesture and form – and, exploring them as formal rather than spiritual elements, he employed them in a Post Modern manner. Executed in 1991, the current Abstraktes Bild (illustrated on the cover) is the most important example of this series ever to have come to the market. It is the first of four pivotal paintings executed that year that are testament to the artist’s ceaseless technical explorations in the field of abstraction and attests to the painterly and intellectual elasticity that is unique to Richter’s work. The work is also the most manifest expression of his intensive skill as a colourist. In fact, there are elements in the present work not dissimilar to the deep tonal resonances of a great Rothko painting – amid a panoply of arresting reds and oranges, the surface of the painting is regularly interrupted to reveal tantalizing glimpses of hot yellows and lush green. Abstraktes Bild is estimated at £1,400,000-1,800,000 ($2,760,000-3,550,000).

Arguably the finest painter of his generation, Peter Doig’s (born 1959) White Canoe, dated 1990/91, depicts a lone white canoe drifting within an eerily moonlit panorama - a scene inspired by a film still from the cult-horror classic ‘Friday 13th’ and his childhood spent in Canada. The rich, densely-layered, vibrant surface erupts with colour, life and an overwhelming sense of untamed painterly passion. Regarded as one of the artist’s most important and iconic masterpieces, it heralds the sublime fruition of his earlier investigations into the fragile balance and outdated Modernist distinction between abstract and figurative modes of painting. Delicately worked areas of misty pointillism float across the impenetrable yet translucent surface, jostling for position with spontaneous Pollockian drips and sweeping abstract gestures that form a lattice-like matrix of brushmarks. Under the viewer’s gaze, the freshness of the surface and the inventiveness of the organic composition rejoice in the medium’s inherent malleability and its infinite capacity for emotional expression. White Canoe is estimated at £800,000-1,200,000 ($1,580,000-2,370,000).

Executed in 1961, Head (Man in Blue) by Francis Bacon (1909-92) is an extraordinary example from the artist’s series of anonymous Heads, painted at a watershed moment of his career. A seminal painting, its relatively small scale and the compositional focus on the head simultaneously look back to the Man in Blue series of 1954 and forward to the portraits of the later 1960s and 1970s. Its proportions and the close cropping of the image are prescient of Bacon’s sustained study of the portrait genre over the next two decades. In Head (Man in Blue), we can discern a double portrait – a conflation of two blurred, contorted faces, their features savagely executed with broad, violent strokes. On the right, the unmistakable amorphous, moonlike, swollen physiognomy of the artist himself; on the left, the thinner, more angular features and swept back fair hair reminiscent of Peter Lacy, who was Bacon’s tempestuous lover for over a decade, and who died just a year after this portrait was painted. The work is estimated at £1,000,000-1,500,000 ($1,980,000-2,690,000).

Works by American masters of the late 20th century are particularly abundant in the sale. Still Life with Oysters, Fish in a Bowl and Book, dated 1973, is the most ambitious and compositionally complex work in a suite of three fishbowl paintings by Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), broadly based on a group of works by Henri Matisse. It is one of Lichtenstein’s most iconic images from a series of still-life paintings executed in the early 1970s, the artist’s most consistent exploration of a single theme since the cartoon Pop paintings of the 1960s. On temporary loan to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco since 2003, this work embodies the two fundamental tenets that underpin Lichtenstein’s oeuvre: his intuitive grasp of the nature of visual communication and the abiding legitimacy of previous modern art movements. The painting is estimated at £2,000,000-3,000,000 ($3,950,000-5,920,000).

Following the huge success of Sotheby’s 20th Century Italian sale in October 2006, the February sale includes one of the most accomplished works by Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) to come to the market to date. With its thick chalky pleats, Achrome 1959 is one of the largest and very best examples of his life-long investigation into the meaning of the painted surface and represents the pinnacle of his aesthetic of separateness from the artistic process. Having emerged into the art world in the early 1950s alongside Fontana and Klein, Manzoni tried to define a new method with which to approach the pictorial surface during the crucial post-war period of artistic innovation and cultural upheaval. Through the Achromes, Manzoni was capable of imbuing an aesthetically sublime work with a highly conceptual premise, and by 1959, he had discovered the use of kaolin, the material which, when applied to pleated canvas, proved to best embody the artist’s attempt to minimize any sense of his own personality or gesture that might contaminate the purity of the image. This outstanding example from the Achrome series, which anticipated both Minimalism and Arte Povera, is estimated at £1,500,000-2,000,000 ($2,960,000-3,950,000).

A fantastic group of late works by Andy Warhol (1928-1987) is spearheaded by a large-scale work entitled Hammer and Sickle, executed in 1976, (estimate: £1,200,000-1,800,000; $2,370,000-3,550,000) which forms part of a cycle of paintings that Warhol exhibited under the title Still Lifes at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1977. Depicting a hammer and sickle, motifs laden with semantic and political symbolism, with his non-partisan exhibition title, Warhol disingenuously attempted to disassociate himself from any political meaning of the work. However, the Cold War being at its height at the time, he could not paint a series of images of the hammer and the sickle without inviting politicized glosses from his critics. Skull, also from 1976 (estimate: £450,000-650,00; $890,000-1,290,000) is one of a series of Skulls which Warhol produced as part of his lifelong obsession with the fragility of life, returning to the theme more than a decade after his celebrated Electric Chairs, Car Crashes and Race Riots series of the early 1960s. Finally, Self Portrait (Fright Wig), executed during 1986, in the months preceding Warhol’s untimely death, is part of the artist’s final series of self-portraits, which are among the most intense and iconic works of his career. Often referred to as the ‘Fright Wig’ series, for obvious reasons, this bold series immortalises the mysterious and enigmatic artistic persona that Warhol had meticulously cultivated throughout his career. It is estimated at £1,200,000-1,500,000 ($2,370,000-2,960,000).

Untitled (Black Skull) by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) is one of the artist’s most ambitious explorations to date of the leitmotif that would become central to his expressionist iconography: the skull.