Art collectors, get egg-cited: An influential work by Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana will soon be up for grabs.
Next month, Sotheby’s New York will be hosting its annual Contemporary Evening Auction, and headlining the event will be a canvas from Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, La fine di Dio (translating to Spatial Concept, The End of God) series gathered by Texas-based collectors Cindy and Howard Rachofsky. The punctured, cadmium-yellow piece is slated to hit the auction block with an estimate between $20 million to $30 million, making it one of the most valuable works by Fontana ever offered. The Rachofskys originally acquired the egg-shaped painting for a record-setting $2.3 million in 2003.
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“This is Lucio Fontana at his finest,” said David Galperin, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art in a press statement. “Dazzling like the sun itself, the painting is the ultimate testament to the artist’s decades-long fascination with depth, light, and space. Just as the impact of the Second World War and the atomic bomb broke open a new language for Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, the advent of space exploration, ushered in by Yuri Gagarin’s flight in 1961, became the catalyst for opening a new dimension of painting with Fontana’s La fine di Dio series.”
According to the auction house, this is the first time that a yellow Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio will be offered at auction since 2015. That year, a canvas in the same vibrant hue set the artist’s auction record when it sold for an eye-watering $29.2 million. Of the 38 post-war Italian paintings in the series, there were only four that were created in monochrome yellow. This specific work, however, was part of Fontana’s retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019.
“Collecting art has given us a new perspective on the world—one that is informed by looking beyond the established American canon and toward the greatest achievements in art making around the globe,” the Rachofskys said in a press statement. “Lucio Fontana is an artist who has always fascinated us. His groundbreaking approach to abstraction and the philosophical themes in his work have been foundational in evolving our thinking about the collection. The pursuit to find the perfect Fine di Dio painting took many years, and when we finally found it, it raised the bar for our collection to another level—an approach which has guided us in making further acquisitions over the course of our collecting journey.”
Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction will take place on May 15. If you want to scope out Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio ahead of time, the series will be on display in Sotheby’s galleries in Milan from April 5-11 and then in New York from May 2-15.
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