LONDON.- Christie’s announced the sale of 44 major Post-War works from The Essl Collection which will be sold in a landmark, stand-alone evening auction in London on Monday, 13 October 2014. The sale will comprise of masterpieces by the giants of German Post-War and Contemporary Art including Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz, Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke and Neo Rauch, as well as major works by international artists such as Cindy Sherman, Frank Stella, Louise Bourgeois and Morris Louis. The selection for sale has been carefully made from the Museum’s holding of 7,000 works and will reflect the quality and breadth of the Museum’s collection, which has been put together with great care by Agnes and Karlheinz Essl over a period of 50 years. Included in the sale will also be two works by the leading Austrian artists, Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Maria Lassnig, which reflect the Essl Museum’s reputation as the home of the greatest collection of Austrian Contemporary Art in the world. The sale of these 44 works from The Essl Collection carries a pre-sale estimate of £40,000,000-60,000,000.

Commenting on the sale, Jussi Pylkkänen, President of Christie’s EMERI adds “The collection that Agnes and Karlheinz Essl have carefully put together over so many years is one of the most renowned and admired collections of Contemporary Art in Europe. In recent years the prominence of the major German Post-War artists has risen season by season. The auction will give international collectors a unique opportunity to bid for masterpieces by the giants of modern German painting such as Baselitz, Richter, Polke, Kippenberger, Rauch and Oehlen. The exhibition of 44 paintings and sculptures will provide a fascinating overview of 50 years of work. It will be a great privilege to auctioneer the sale here at King Street in October at the beginning of Frieze Week”.

The Essl Museum, built by Austrian architect Heinz Tesar in Klosterneuburg, Vienna is dedicated to sharing its passion for art and giving back to society through their ever-evolving exhibition programme, which has presented many important international artists for the first time in Austria, and through an extensive educational program for children and adults alike, designed to build bridges in various ways.

“Ever since we started collecting works of art it was our concern to facilitate access to art as a source of inspiration for as many people as possible. Art enriches life and releases innovative forces. It is a vital ingredient of life and broadens our insights into the workings of life and human existence. In this spirit we would like to see it as a contribution to the positive development of our society. In order to secure our collection and museum for generations to come, we decided to part from 44 carefully selected works from our collection” stated Agnes and Karlheinz Essl.

“Agnes and Karlheinz Essl are among the most important collectors of contemporary art in the world. Any visitor to the Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg, Vienna has borne witness not simply to an assembly of the most influential art of the past 60 years, but has felt Agnes and Karlheinz Essl’s passion for art and their desire to share it with the public. Identifying artists of keen interest, building relationships with the artists and their work and collecting in depth are hallmarks of their activity over the last fifty years. The selection for sale incorporates a landmark grouping of important artworks by giants of German Post-War and Contemporary art including Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz, Martin Kippenberger, and Sigmar Polke. From key self-portrait paintings and sculpture by Baselitz and Kippenberger to the much celebrated and unique Clouds (Window) by Richter and arguably the greatest grouping of Sigmar Polke's works ever to come to market. Rich in the tapestry of styles he concocted, these works represent a remarkable mirror to the retrospective opening at Tate Modern in October. This, combined with Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy, will make Frieze week in October a great moment to celebrate the continued vibrancy of German art today,” commented Francis Outred, Chairman & Head of Post-War & Contemporary Art, Christie's EMERI.

The Essl Collection
The starting point for the collection was the intersection of two lives. Agnes and Karlheinz Essl met in New York in 1959 where Agnes Essl had begun working for Virginia Zabriskie, a young contemporary gallerist in the city. Taking in all that New York had to offer in the late 1950s and early 60s, the Essls developed a spirit of collecting that has become a lifelong passion. They began with a focus on the artists of their country, among them Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Maria Lassnig, and then in the 1990s they widened their scope, bringing the same level of dedication to international art. The collection begins with its heart in Austria, yet like the collectors themselves, who travelled extensively through Europe, America, Asia and Australia visiting artists and galleries, it tours the world and finds its meaning in global experience.

The Essls have cultivated long-standing friendships with many of the artists in their collection, visiting their studios and following the development of their careers. As the collectors themselves have stated, “Intense study and exploration, and perhaps more importantly the personal encounters with artists, has given us a more profound understanding of art and informed the structure of our collection”. Speaking of their friendship with Georg Baselitz, an artist who occupies a prominent position within their collection, the couple has explained: “We have collected from nearly every phase of his career since 1968 and devoted the first solo exhibition in our new museum to Baselitz in 2000 ‘In the Forest of Blainville/Painting 1996- 2000’. Georg Baselitz and his wife Elke have been our friends now for many years. Private visits with them are among the highlights of our encounters with artists.”

ESSL : 44 – Highlights
“Sigmar Polke has consistently wrested new facets from painting. The most diverse image carriers, from prefabricated decor fabrics all the way to transparent sheets of plastic in conjunction with experimental painting techniques have led to astonishing results. This innovative approach has fascinated me again and again” (Karlheinz Essl).

The evening sale on 13 October 2014 will be led by five major works by Sigmar Polke, arguably the greatest grouping of Polke works ever to come to auction. They span over two decades of the artist’s radical career, providing commentary on image-making, materials and the potential of painting. These include the psychedelic Pop-inspired Indian with Eagle (1975, estimate £1,500,000-2,000,000) and the large-scale 1997 work For the third rank, there are only crumbs (estimate £2,5000,000-3,500,000) which blends figurative and abstract idioms alongside Polke’s trademark raster-dots. The artist’s celebrated retrospective Sigmar Polke: Alibis is due to arrive at the Tate Modern, London, this October, having opened to critical acclaim in MoMA, New York.

The collection also tells a story of self-portraiture in painting and sculpture from Georg Baselitz to Kippenberger. Finger Painting Nude, 1972, (estimate £800,000-1,200,000) is an important self-portrait painted in the signature upside-down style that propelled Baselitz to international acclaim in 1969. It belongs to a small but significant group of large-scale self-portrait nudes begun in 1972, and is an early instance of the liberating finger-painting technique that Baselitz initiated during the same year. My New Cap, 2003, (estimate £1,500,000-2,000,000) is the first of Baselitz’s series of monumental totemic sculptures. The work has been widely exhibited in major international retrospectives, including those held at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2007 and the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2011.

Martin Kippenberger’s Untitled (from the series Hand-Painted Pictures, estimate £2,500,000-3,500,000) is a seminal oil on canvas from 1992. The painting belongs to a rare and outstanding group of self- portraits that came to define Kippenberger's career; many of which are now held in major private and public collections including those of Annick and Anton Herbert, Christopher Wool and Charline von Heyl, the Flick Collection and Centre Georges Pompidou. Kippenberger’s nine- part painting Terrorist offspring from the southern Mediterranean sea (estimate £2,000,000- 3,000,000) created in 1984 during the artist’s watershed decade presents a brilliant series of portraits, including Joseph Beuys’ Mother and John Lennon’s Son Dressed as a Woman, executed with the artist’s characteristic irreverence and wit.

Gerhard Richter’s Net, 1985, (estimate £7,000,000-10,000,000) is an exceptional example of the artist’s abstract practice. Painted on a vast scale, the work reflects Richter’s dedication to advancing his medium through its virtuosic spectrum of colour, texture and technical innovation. Its title conjures allusions to the figurative world, indicating the artist’s fascination with the complex terrain between abstraction and representation. It is joined by the monumental four-panel work Clouds (Window), 1970 (estimate £5,000,000- 7,000,000), one of Richter’s most important cloud paintings; a rare example where the artist is seen capturing the evening sky through a window. It is rendered with the exquisite photorealism that defined the artist’s early output.

Albert Oehlen is one of contemporary art’s most iconoclastic figures. Protégé of Polke, comrade of Kippenberger and enfant terrible of the 1980s, Oehlen’s wildly experimental impulse was a trailblazing force within the post-Punk generation. His cataclysmic dialogue with painting at a time when Minimalism and Conceptualism had declared it dead marked him out as a leading figure within the second wave of German post-war art.

“The Austrian artist Maria Lassnig is surely a phenomenon. She continued to paint pictures even at a late stage of life – never failing to astonish us with their forceful vitality. Similar to Louise Bourgeois, Maria Lassnig’s international breakthrough came late in her career. Awards and museum exhibitions have now drawn the attention of the art world to her. She is represented in our collection by many works and in 2005 we devoted a personal exhibition to her ‘Maria Lassnig. Body. Fiction. Nature’ (Karlheinz Essl).

Abstraction is a prominent theme within the collection of 44 works, beginning with the rich layered paintings of Pierre Soulages and the beautifully coloured, minimal compositions of Frank Stella and Morris Louis all dating from the 1960s and 70s.

Also within the collection is a strong, curated section of female artists including Cecily Brown’s 2006 seductive, painterly diptych Ha Ha Fresh (estimate £400,000-600,000), a 1978 romantic black and white film still by Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still (#22-A) (estimate £150,000-200,000), Untitled a towering diptych of woven tulips by Rosemarie Trockel (estimate £400,000-600,000, illustrated above left), Two Painters, Three Canvas, 1986, a striking portrait in vivid colours by major Austrian artist Maria Lassnig (estimate £120,000-180,000) and Spider Home, 2002, an iconic spider by Louise Bourgeois (estimate £350,000-450,000).

“These artists steadily pursued their artistic path, continued to develop their methods with manifold experiments in form and technique, and produced results that continue to astonish the art world up to the present day” (Karlheinz Essl).

Katharine Arnold, Head of the Evening Auction, Post-War & Contemporary Art London, commented: “It has been a great pleasure to work alongside the Essl Museum, carefully curating this group of 44 outstanding works from the collection. We share the same passion for Post-War and Contemporary Art and I look forward to achieving a great result for this major Austrian institution.”