Hockney’s still-life to hit the auction block
BRITISH artist David Hockney’s 30 Sunflowers will lead Sotheby’s Contemporary Art evening sale on April 6.
This monumental still-life belongs to a series of 25 flower paintings that the 82-year-old artist created in 1996, with only two in the grand scale that 30 Sunflowers occupies.
Hockney’s passion for flower still-lifes arose during the summer of 1995, after he visited an exhibition dedicated to Dutch Baroque master Johannes Vermeer at the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
“It was absolutely thrilling. I was amazed. After 350 years the colour is still so vibrant ... It got me thinking about the fugitive nature of colour unless you treat it physically correctly,” he once said of this retrospective, which prompted Hockney to reproduce Vermeer’s techniques in his own flower paintings.
Despite its Van Gogh-inspired vibrant palette, 30 Sunflowers was executed at a time when the British painter was coping with the passing of his great friend and champion Henry Geldzahler, as well as of his close friend and fellow artist Sandra Fisher.
“I have always painted flowers for friends who were ill,” Hockney said of his series of flower paintings.
In April, 30 Sunflowers will go under the hammer for the first time since 2011, when it fetched a modest US$2.5 million (RM10.4 million) at Phillips sale in New York.
As the first masterpiece by Hockney to appear at auction in Asia, 30 Sunflowers is rumoured to be capable of fetching in the region of HK$80 million (about RM42.8 million).
Hockney’s market considerably boomed since the monumental still-life was last offered at auction, with the Yorkshire-born artist realising half of his top prices in the last five years.
Hockney notably made headlines in November 2018 when his famed Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) fetched US$90.3 million (RM375.8 million) at Christie’s New York.
At the time, he momentarily became the most expensive living artist, before being dethroned a few months later by Jeff Koons with the US$91.1 million (RM379 million) sale of his Rabbit. – AFP-Relaxnews