Milan, Contemporary Art's seasonal sale at Sotheby's. Morandi stands out at €3 million

Significant results last night at the seasonal Contemporary Art auction at Sotheby’s in Milan, held at the London auction house’s Milan headquarters in Palazzo Serbelloni on Corso Venezia: 62 top lots and by many of the greatest 20th-century and modern-day artists almost all sold. Taking the lion’s share was a Still Life by Giorgio Morandi (1959), lot number 16, which started from an estimate of 700,000-1,000,000 euros: it managed to quintuple its base estimate and sold for 3.423 million euros.

It was not the highest-estimated work at the start: leading the sale were in fact a Sofà by Domenico Gnoli (estimate 1-1.5 million), which, however, was withdrawn at the last minute, and a peculiar Colonna in paper (1968) by Alighiero Boetti, also estimated at 1-1.5 million euros. Boetti presented his first three columns in an exhibition at the l’Arco d’Alibert gallery in Rome: “First of a series of nine, all made over the course of 1968,” we read in the catalog, “the three columns are a realistic reproduction of classical columns, which, however, contain within themselves a paradox. Boetti chooses, in fact, to combine the element of the classical world - perfectly in line with the context of the Eternal City, with its solid, apparently rigorous and statuesque nature, whose very function is to support - with typical pastry components - mass-produced, fragile, subtle and evocative of sweetness and gluttony.”:The Column was awarded for the sum of 1.668,500 euros

Life

The third top lot of the evening is a Spatial Concept, New York (1962) by Lucio Fontana, a work in which the catalog note states, “Fontana wanted to transpose the emotions that New York conveyed to him”, after having tried at first to reproduce the New York landscape, using gold oil paint, and soon realizing that its reflections are too dark to achieve a faithful and realistic rendering of the beams of light and the dynamism of the “City that never sleeps.” The work started from an estimate of 5-700,000 euros: the auctioneer’s hammer struck an award of 1.245 million euros. Fontana was the most featured artist at the auction: sold more of his space concepts, including one from 1962 that sold for 756,000 euros (400-600.000 the initial estimate), while with more cold reception were works less associated with the artist, such as the very special terracotta Dragon , executed by the artist in Albissola Marina in 1949-1951, and designed to decorate the interior of a private home.

Among the living artists, good results for Maurizio Cattelan, with one of his “Z” Untitled sold for slightly more than the base estimate of 150-200,000 euros (163,800 the final price) and for Francesco Vezzoli, whose Hommage to Francesco Scavullo: Untitled Diva tripled the initial estimate of 24-35,000 euros and made the hammer stop at 73,080, ,while little interest was aroused by Niente e subito by Giulio Paolini and L’Universo? by Mimmo Paladino. Interesting results also for a Plain by Salvo (adjudicated at 69,300 euros against an initial estimate of 30-40,000), for Giuseppe Capogrossi’s Superficie 397 (352,800, it started from an estimate of 200-300,000), for the work It was where I was born but where I was born didn’t matter by Gastone Novelli (176,400 euros, estimate 80-120,000).

Among the works by foreigners, Henryk Stazewski’s Relief No. 8 (1969) stands out, the fourth highest adjudication of the evening: 1,003,000 euros, it started from an estimate of 300-400.000 for this interesting work by the pioneer of the Polish avant-garde, described in the catalog as a “manifestation of the artist’s logical-mathematical rigor,” and where, however, “as an exception to the artist’s self-imposed strict rules, the regularity of the vertically striped composition is interrupted by the variation of color tones between one element and another,” resulting in “a dynamic work, which deceives the eye of the beholder with an illusory and mesmerizing vibration, very fascinating from an aesthetic point of view.”

Milan, Contemporary Art's seasonal sale at Sotheby's. Morandi stands out at €3 million

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