SALE: Modern and Contemporary art
LOCATION: Christie's, Palazzo Clerici, Milan
DATE: April 22-23
ABOUT: Next week, Christie's Milan will auction off a variety of hot works by Lucio Fontana, Alighiero Boetti, and Giorgio De Chirico.
Among the most anticipated are Fontana's brightly colored, characteristically distressed canvases. This series of works, which he entitled his "Concetti spaziali (Spatial Concepts)," was meant to suggest to the viewer a way of looking beyond the illusion of the canvas and into "free space," as he called it. Many works in the "Concetti spazialia" series were seen at the Fontana survey at Gagosian Gallery last summer, and these canvases will be some of the priciest items up for sale at next week's auction. "Concetto spaziale, Attese" (1964), a red canvas with three vertical slashes, has a high estimate of $930,000. Another in this series, a grey textured canvas that looks like the surface of the moon, is expected to bring in the same.
Tied with the aforementioned Fontanas for the top high-estimate spot is "Ettore e Andromaca" (1969), one of several colorful paintings by Surrealist master Giorgio De Chirico. Paintings by Giacomo Balla, Enrico Castellani, and Josef Albers's "Homage to the Square: Saturated" will also be up for sale.