VIENNA.- Dorotheum's fourth and final international auction week this year is above all characterised by a strong offer in Modern & Contemporary Art. Marc Chagall's Fleurs, 1924, €750,000-1,000,000, is an absolute highlight of Modern Art auction on 23 November 2016, and as much an homage to mother nature as it is a still life.
Giacomo Balla's square-shaped Valori plastici, 1929, holds the entire cumulative force and energy of Futurism condensed into one intense expression.
The Contemporary Art Auction on 22 November 2016 includes works of incredible quality by artists as diverse as: Carla Accardi, Agostino Bonalumi, Paolo Scheggi and Guiseppe Uncini in the Italian section, which also includes pieces by Tano Festa and poetic works by Pier Paolo Calzolari; the ZERO art movement members Herbert Zangs, Adolf Luther and Günter Uecker representing the New German Art, and Maria Lassnig, Franz West and Arnulf Rainer among the Austrian artists – with a particularly interesting early Arnulf Rainer work Zentralgestaltung, 1951.
The auction week is rounded off by a strong selection of antique silver, antiquities, jewellery and pocket watches.
Big Names
Contemporary Art Auction, 22 and 24 November 2016 (Parts I and II)
Both auctions showcase a long list of works by some of contemporary world’s most notable names, including Robort Longo, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, to name a few.
Ilya Kabakov's Landscape with a barge, 2002, €160,000-240,000 depicts several styles of painting and realities – as well as various fictitious artist identities – all in a single canvas. The almost impressionist river landscape, archetypical of Soviet era genre motives, is merged with abstract shapes in what can be considered a clear reference to the radical aesthetics of Russian Modernism.
Chuck Close assembles faces one tiny piece at a time, like pixels or mosaic stones. Supermodel Kate Moss, the emblematic face of 1990s pop culture, is depicted make up-free, and appearing eerily statue-like. The large format pigment print is a single-edition print, with an estimate of €100,000-150,000.
Once again, Dorotheum is able to bring together an incredibly strong selection of Post-War Art: German and Italian 1960s avant-garde artworks feature Pier Paolo Calzolari, Joseph Beuys (Estimate €120,000 – 160,000).
Guiseppe Uncini radically demonstrates in his work Cementarmato, 1959, €150,000 – 200,000, that cement and steel also hold poetic qualities. Avant-garde artists Enrico Castellani, Paolo Scheggi, Enrico Bonalumi and Dadamaino are bound together by their unconventional painting structure, and in the auctions they are joined by Lucio Fontana and his Concetto spaziale, Teatrino, 1964, €200,000–300,000, one of the earliest works from the celebrated teatrini series.
Members of the ZERO movement, artistically speaking Germany's „new beginning“ following World War II, leaned heavily on a radical stylistic idioms, abstraction and kinetics to achieve the desired artistic reset. Light is often a key means of expression in their works.
Made in Austria
Modern & Contemporary Art auctions include fantastic examples of Austrian art, including artists such as Maria Lassnig, Franz West, Otto Muehl and Arnulf Rainer, whose work Zentralgestaltung, 1951, €190,000 – 230,000, comes from a period when he was a member of the so-called „Hundsgruppe“ (The dog pack) and signed his paintings „TRRR“, an imitation of a dog's growl. In search of a new expression, young Rainer was inspired by surrealism and he started creating drawings with his eyes closed, relinquishing his art creation process to gestures beyond his control, copying hand movements on small sheets of paper, as in an act of seismography.
Rainer said: „The scribblings soon became clearer. I recognised their figures; they were always the same central or vertical lines, with the exception of occasional wavy, hairy, light strokes. Naively, I thought myself to have found the holy grail, the shorthand for art itself. More often now I would keep my eyes open, producing larger formats, consciously pursuing those central and vertical lines.“
Albin Egger-Lienz's Madonna, 1922, €100,000 – 160,000, is an extraordinary painting from 1922. Similarly, Werner Berg’s Austernstrauß auf Kärntnerdecke (€ 100,000 – 150,000) is a strong work where expressive colouring and symbolism are unifying traits in the perfectly illustrated.
Flowers presented by Chagall
Modern Art auction on 23 November 2016
One of the central themes in Marc Chagall's oeuvre, in addition to the entwined lovers, is the flower bouquet. It often takes centre stage in his paintings, clearly reminiscent of French and Russian influence. Chagall’s Fleurs, 1924, €750,000 – 1,000,000 is a particularly exquisite example of a style that seamlessly merges nature study with abstraction and figuration. Chagall said that painting a bouquet is like painting a landscape: for him it signified France. Religion also features in Chagall’s work, and the red book prominently placed in the painting's bottom half is interpreted by experts as possibly being a depiction of the Bible.
Futuristic Lightning by Balla
Giacomo Balla painted and mounted 24 quadratic canvases in the hallway of his new apartment in Rome. One of them will be coming under the hammer at Dorotheum during auction week. The sky in Valori plastici is shredded by lightning, a dynamic city portrait fully charged with the spirit of futurism. It's an energetic work that conveys effectively the faith in the future, in velocity and dynamism which prevailed at the time (€150,000 – 180,000).
Vigorously Modern
This auction week's 20th Century top lots include Max Ernst, Otto Mueller, Paul Klee, Giorgio de Chirico and Francis Picabia. Karl Hofer's objective-classicist painting Mädchen, sich kämmend combines in a highly individual style the classical ideal with modernism. Aesthetic perfection was never Hofer's ambition. He aimed instead to „depict the intrinsic anatomy“ of his subject matter as a means of exploring its true essence (€ 180,000 – 250,000).
