Displaying items by tag: essl collection

After its Essl Collection sale on Monday kicked off the Frieze-week frenzy, Christie’s returned on Thursday night with its main event of the week.

Peter Doig’s first tropical painting led a carefully edited postwar and contemporary auction. The house tried to catch the prevailing mood favoring young artists—like the many being exhibited at this week’s fairs—and the German masters now on view in many of the British capital’s biggest galleries.

Still, the top lot was Doig’s “The Heart of Old San Juan,” dating from 1999, showing an emerald-green basketball court by the sea. The tranquil painting attracted some interest in the salesroom and sold for £4.56 million (about $7.26 million).

Christie’s sold 46.9 million pounds ($75.3 million) of postwar and contemporary art at the start of Frieze week in London, as a Gerhard Richter estimated at as much as 10 million pounds failed to find a buyer at the auction.

Richter’s “Netz,” a red, yellow and green abstract painting, was sold after the auction to a private U.S. collector for 5.5 million pounds, Francis Outred, head of postwar and contemporary art, Europe, said at a news conference after last night’s sale.

The 44 works, from the Essl Collection of contemporary art in Austria, produced a total that fell within the auction house’s presale estimated range of 40 million to 56.8 million pounds.

Austrian tycoon Hans Peter Haselsteiner has come to the rescue of home-improvements millionaire Karlheinz Essl by buying a modern art collection that Essl had tried in vain to sell to the state to prop up his BauMax business empire.

A spokeswoman for Haselsteiner, whose family foundation has a 25 percent stake in construction group Strabag, confirmed a report in newspaper Die Presse on Tuesday that the Essl collection had been bought.

A new firm owned 60 percent by the Haselsteiner family foundation and 40 percent by Essl family vehicles is paying more than 100 million euros ($131 million) for the collection, the paper said. The money would help shore up the BauMax group.

The Essl Collection which is one of Europe's finest collections of contemporary art is to be liquidated. The 7,000 works will be sold off in London, this October after Karlheinz Essl the owner of the BauMax hardware store chain suffered near-insolvency. The collection was organised as a non-profit private foundation and is an important part of Austrian cultural heritage and of great international cultural value. Agnes and Karlheinz Essl’s passion for art has given the collection its unique signature.

The main focus of the collection was Austrian art from 1945 with works by artists like Maria Lassnig, Valie Export, Arnulf Rainer, Max Weiler, Markus Prachensky, the artist of the Viennese Actionism like Hermann Nitsch and Günter Brus, new painting of the 1980s to the younger generation of Austrian artists such as Elke Krystufek and Clemens Wolff.