A stunning pink portrait of the Queen by Chris Levine, a daring Richard Hamilton sculpture that includes fake teeth, and three Banksy prints are among the lots on offer in Sotheby’s upcoming Made in Britain sale.
Levine’s “Lightness of Being,” which depicts Queen Elizabeth II with her eyes closed in a delightfully serene pose, is often called an “accidental masterpiece” and dates back to 2008, when the artist was asked to take a portrait of the monarch. Since then, the work has been published in various sizes, editions and materials with one fetching £187,500 (about $244,000) at auction in 2017.
The edition on offer, produced in 2015, is a multi-colored silkscreen with hand-applied Swarovski crystals. There’s a dominant pink hue on one side, and a variant of the same image on the reverse. It’s expected to fetch up to £100,000 (about $130,000).
The Banksys on offer, dating back to 2004 and 2005, are limited editions screenprints on wove paper. The most valuable among them, expected to sell for as much as £25,000 ($33,000), is titled “Gangsta Rat.”
“For many, the prospect of owning a work by Banksy is far beyond the realms of possibility, with spray paintings selling for hundreds of thousands of pounds, said Sotheby’s modern British art specialist and the auction’s head of sale, Robin Cawdron-Stewart, in an email interview, “but prints offer the opportunity to acquire a work by this leading contemporary artist for much less.”
The late painter and collage artist Richard Hamilton is well represented with six works up for auction, the most peculiar being “The Critic Laughs” from 1971-1972, a multiple made of an electric toothbrush, false teeth and a black box, signed by the artist.
“(It’s) a tongue-in-cheek look at the advancement of technology and the changing attitudes towards modern living,” said Cawdron-Stewart.
The sale also features artists such as Miles Aldridge, Damien Hirst, Ian Davenport, Bridget Riley, Howard Hodgkin and David Hockney, who recently made headlines for the upcoming sale of his “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” which is poised to smash the auction record for a work by living artist.
Cawdron-Stewart’s highlights for the sale include Lucian Freud’s “Figure Studies” from the 1940s, which has “incredible provenance, having formerly been owned by the artist Cedric Morris – who ran The East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, where Freud studied”; 1984’s “Ribbed Chest Form” by sculptor and potter James Tower, “whose works are housed in important private and public collections all around the world, but incredibly can still be bought at auction for under the £10,000 ($13,000) mark”; and Nic Fiddian Green’s “Horse at Water XV” from 2001, “a slightly smaller version of the monumental sculpture that for many years has been a London landmark, standing tall amid the hustle and bustle of Marble Arch.”
The Made in Britain sale takes place at Sotheby’s in London on Sept. 18, 2018.