LONDON.-Sotheby’s forthcoming Evening Sale of Contemporary Art, to be held in London on Thursday, June 21, 2007 will showcase one of the finest and most important group of works by Post-War and Contemporary artists ever to come to the market in Europe, with British artists once again dominating the list of highlights. With a pre-sale estimate of £40.6 - 57.1 million, it will be the largest sale in the category at Sotheby’s London to date.

Spearheading the group is the most important self portrait by Francis Bacon (1909-92) to have ever come to auction. His sublime Self Portrait, painted in 1978, is an iconic image of one of the most influential figurative painters of the late 20th century. One of approximately 14 large scale single panel self-portraits, of which this is the first to appear at auction, it combines the sinuous paint handling, visceral intensity and psychological depth characteristic of his mature oeuvre. The work is estimated at £8-12 million. The inclusion of this masterpiece follows on from the unprecedented success of Bacon’s Study from Innocent X, which was sold at Sotheby’s New York in May 2007 for a world record price of $52.6 million.

Continuing the grand tradition of the history of art from Vivaldi to Poussin and Monet to Twombly, Damien Hirst’s (born 1965) Lullaby Spring takes on that most ever present of allegorical themes, the Four Seasons. Executed in 2002, the present work, measuring almost 3 metres in width and containing 6136 hand-crafted and painted pills, is one from a series of four unique stainless steel cabinets. While each cabinet shares the same formal structure of glass sliding doors, mirrored backboard and stainless steel casing, each is differentiated by the assortment of pills that are lined up along the razor sharp shelves with the geometric precision of scientific experiment. Individually cast in bronze and intricately hand painted, the unique combination of life-sized pills in each cabinet designates the work’s title: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. In Lullaby Spring Hirst presents a life-giving, polychrome array of myriad brightly coloured tablets, capsules and lozenges in an allegorical celebration of Spring. The work is estimated at £3-4 million and is expected to achieve a new world record for the artist at auction.

Another major late 20th century British artist, Bridget Riley (born 1931), for whom Sotheby’s achieved a new world record price in February of this year, will be represented by one of the most important of her early works to come to the market. Primitive Blaze, from 1963-64, is one of only five know variations of the Blaze motif, and the present painting has not been seen in public since the 1960s, when it was acquired by its current owner. The Blaze composition won Riley the John Moores Prize in 1964 and also the attention of curator William Seitz who included her work in the landmark Op Art exhibition, The Responsive Eye, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965. In Primitive Blaze, the alternating black and white spokes shuttling back and forth compose a tier of six dilating and contracting concentric rings that deny fixity. The work is estimated at £400,000-600,000.

Following on from the phenomenal success of Peter Doig’s (born 1959) White Canoe, which realised a world record price of £5.7 million in Sotheby’s February auction of Contemporary Art in London, the forthcoming sale will again be graced by a beautiful work by the artist. Orange Sunshine, first exhibited at the artist’s second solo show at the Victoria Miro Gallery, is an electrifying work from his highly acclaimed series of snow scenes. While the encrusted surface of this canvas harks back to late works by Claude Monet, and the artist is deliberately engaging with the grand tradition of landscape painting, as the colloquial title suggests, its subject matter of a snowboarder mid ‘tail-grab’, is entirely contemporary. The work is estimated at £600,000-800,000.

Having witnessed the enormous success of works by Banksy (born 1975) at auction over the period of the past year, Sotheby’s has taken the leap of including a work by the self-proclaimed ‘guerrilla artist’ in an Evening Sale of Contemporary Art for the first time. Pie Face, a work of oil on canvas from 2006, is estimated at £70,000-100,000, the highest pre-sale estimate which has ever been conferred on a work by the artist.

The present work comes from his most celebrated series to date called ‘Crude Oils’ – modified oil paintings in which he applies his street graffiti to fine art paintings by other artists. Often compared to 1980s American street artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat (whose Untitled, 1982 was sold for $14.6 million at Sotheby’s New York in May), with his ‘Crude Oils’, Banksy has referenced works by the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg.

The sale is rich in works by Andy Warhol (1928-87), and highlighting the selection of nine pieces by him (with a combined estimate of £7.2 to £10.2 million) is one of his most iconic recurring themes, the dollar sign. With his Dollar Signs paintings, Warhol undeniably signalled that "big-time art is big-time money" and he bluntly printed the sign for money as the sign for art. The artist worked on this series of flamboyantly coloured and characteristically drawn works in 1981 and showed them for the first time at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1982. As at other points in his career, Warhol seems to have predicted the main focus for the decade to come: the pursuit of money. The present example is estimated at £1.8-2.5 million. Another highlight by Warhol in the sale is his portrait of Ethel Scull. Executed in June-July 1963, Ethel Scull is a pivotal work in Warhol’s breakthrough of Pop Art. Among the best known of his early Pop portraits, it is significantly his first screen-printed portrait based on photo-booth images, and his experimentation with colour in this rare polychrome screen altered the way Warhol used colour and seriality in his subsequent works. Ethel Scull and her husband Robert, who commissioned the portrait, were pioneering collectors of Pop Art and built one of the most important collections of the 1960s, many pieces of which were sold at Sotheby’s in a ground-breaking single owner sale in 1973. The present work is estimated at £1.5-2 million.

Two important works, from two very different periods, are included by the great German artist Gerhard Richter (born 1932). Richter has brilliantly fluctuated between abstract and figurative painting throughout his career which has spanned more than 50 years, and he continues to seamlessly deconstruct and question the complex, often hidden relationships that underlie art, reality and perception. Undoubtedly influenced by the German Romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries, Teyde-Landschaft resides within a permanent state of tension between order and dissipation. The complex interplay of hue and shade between abstract and material forms, creating an apparently transient image with Turner-esque feathered veils that elevate the subject from the realm of the everyday to the sublime. Meanwhile, Stuhl (Chair), one of the artist’s most lively and colourful Abstract paintings, where the chair’s linear form is merely suggested through a minimalist geometric space-frame that seems to project outward and into the viewer’s space. The sense of depth is enhanced further by the sumptuous impasto and the array of contradictory methods with which it is lavishly applied across the entirety of the fluid surface. Each work is estimated at £1.4-1.8 million.

Further highlights in the sale include works by Post-War masters from both sides of the Atlantic, including Mark Rothko, Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, Roy Lichtenstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as works by Chinese Contemporary artists suc