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From Bacon to Basquiat: Extraordinary Highlights from The London Sales
Coinciding with Frieze Week, our London Sales features standout works of art from Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Jean-Michel Basquiat and more.
T his October, Sotheby’s London will host three magnificent auctions of contemporary art – including one dedicated to David Hockney – against the backdrop of major local art fairs. The London Sales will present a diverse selection of works by the most exciting artists emerging on the auction scene, alongside established titans of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Read on for a small selection of the exciting works on offer.
On 16 October, the Contemporary Evening Auction will coincide with the world-renowned Frieze and Frieze Masters art fairs.
Francis Bacon’s ‘Portrait of a Dwarf,’
Bacon and Rodin: A Dialogue in Flesh and Bronze
Portrait of a Dwarf occupies a singular place in Francis Bacon’s work. The densely striated interior demonstrates Bacon’s powerful connection with Diego Velázquez, most famously seen in his Pope series. Bacon uniquely retained this work as his own, and took the extraordinary step of exhibiting it as property of the artist in a series of exhibitions over several years, most sensationally and to unrestrained acclaim in the famous Galerie Claude Bernard exhibition in Paris in 1977.
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s ‘Untitled (The Arm)’
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Anatomy of Emotion in ‘The Arm’
Untitled (The Arm) from 1982 stands as one of Basquiat’s most powerful and emblematic works, encapsulating the raw urgency and intellectual depth that defined his practice at its peak. Executed in his breakthrough year, the painting transforms the motif of the arm into a monumental symbol of agency, struggle, and presence, at once anatomical study and existential cipher. Its blazing gold ground evokes both the sacred aura of Byzantine icons and the modern alchemy of Basquiat’s meteoric rise, imbuing the work with a sense of triumph and reverence. Rarely working on quilted fabric supports, Basquiat embraced the resistant material to heighten the tension of the figure’s emergence, amplifying the drama of the mark itself. Fusing art-historical resonance with visceral immediacy, Untitled (The Arm) exemplifies the brilliance and audacity of Basquiat’s vision in 1982 – the year he declared he made his “best paintings ever.”
Yves Klein’s ‘Untitled Fire Colour Painting (FC 28)’
Untitled Fire Colour Painting (FC 28) is an exquisite example of the most experimental and ultimate phase of Yves Klein’s aesthetic exploration. Known as the baroque fire colour paintings, this limited number of only twelve strident works stand distinguished from the entirety of Klein's oeuvre for their unrivalled gestural ferocity and apocalyptic exuberance.
This season’s Contemporary Day Auction presents a dynamic selection of works by some of the most acclaimed and in-demand artists of the past 70 years.
Andy Warhol’s ‘Guns’
Atop a vibrant mix of pink, periwinkle and turquoise, two sleek pistols hover in Andy Warhol’s iconic silkscreen style, bold and hauntingly still. Guns (1981–82) exemplifies Warhol’s talent for turning everyday objects into striking visual icons that blend personal history with cultural critique. Part of a larger series including Knives and Dollar Signs, this work reflects Warhol’s ongoing fascination with mortality, violence, and consumerism. Held in major collections like the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, works from this series are key to his artistic legacy. Guns captures Warhol’s paradoxical approach – seductive yet morbid – inviting viewers to face life’s darker truths through the colorful lens of Pop Art.
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s ‘Untitled’
Executed in 1981, Untitled reveals much about Jean-Michel Basquiat’s early visual language, a condensed visual energy shaped by both raw iconography and complex allusion. First handled by Galleria d’Arte Emilio Mazzoli in Modena, the gallery that gave Basquiat his first European exhibition, the drawing soon entered the renown collection of Alessandro Grassi. The work presents a group of cars, a New York skyscraper, a tipi tent, the artist’s signature crown motif, and the letters ROT. At this moment, Basquiat was beginning to consolidate his voice within the New York downtown art scene, having moved from graffiti interventions under the name SAMO to works that bridged drawing, painting, poetry, and collage. Machines, towers, and vehicles in his work were not celebrated as triumphant achievements but interrogated as contested symbols of modern life.
On 17 October, a dedicated sale will celebrate Hockey’s famed iPad pictures, in which he explored the possibilities of digital drawing in magnificent, novel ways.
5 Reasons Why David Hockney’s iPad Landscape Series Is So Groundbreaking
David Hockney’s ‘The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) – 2 June’
Few contemporary artists have embraced new technology with the same enthusiasm and ingenuity as David Hockney. A pioneering force in post-war British art, Hockney has remained perpetually innovative, defying the constraints of medium and method throughout his career. With The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) – 2 June, he takes digital media to a deeply poetic and painterly place, transforming the iPad – a device more typically associated with casual communication – into a tool for profound artistic expression. This work forms part of Hockney’s celebrated Arrival of Spring series, a body of work consisting of iPad drawings charting the seasonal transformation of the East Yorkshire landscape near Bridlington. Created during the spring and early summer of 2011, each drawing captures a specific moment in nature’s cyclical rebirth. 2 June records the landscape in its summer fullness – trees are in full leaf and the atmosphere is filled with radiating warmth and vitality.
David Hockney’s ‘The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) – 3 January’
Similarly to how the invention of paint tubes in the 1870s revolutionized en plein air painting and birthed a new age of Impressionist painting, the new digital medium offered Hockney a new immediacy and flexibility which he embraced fully, marking a significant chapter in the trajectory of 21st century art. Drawing directly on the screen using his fingers and stylus, Hockney was able to paint en plein air with a vibrancy and clarity not previously possible with traditional tools. The portability of the iPad allowed him to work spontaneously and intuitively, capturing subtle variations in light, form, and color with remarkable precision and fluidity. In the present work, we see Hockney at the height of his observational and compositional powers. The perspective leads the viewer down a quiet country lane framed by overarching trees, a motif that recurs throughout the Woldgate series and evokes the timeless beauty of the English countryside. With its palette of frosted greens, icy blues, and flashes of crimson and lilac, the scene captures the chill and clarity of winter on Woldgate Lane. Though created digitally, the strokes retain a tactile immediacy – branches quiver, the ground glistens with frost, and the atmosphere shimmers with a crystalline light.
