As part of both the Contemporary Art Evening and Day sales, Sotheby’s will auction a selection of works donated by the artists to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in celebration of its 60th anniversary. The selection, comprising many brand new pieces, includes works by Howard Hodgkin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, John Currin, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor and Barbara Kruger. The works have been generously donated by the artists in recognition of the ICA’s impact on the contemporary art landscape and in acknowledgement of the support that the institution has shown new artists at crucial stages in their careers; many of the artists involved had their first exhibition at the ICA and now wish to support the next generation of artistic talent with the funds raised through the auction.

The most important highlight among the works to be offered to benefit the ICA is the oil on board, Ekow, a newly created painting by the artist Howard Hodgkin. The artist - Vice President of the ICA - first showed at the ICA as part of the exhibition Pop Painting, 1960 and then again in the two-person show Two Young Figurative Painters, 1962, alongside Allen Jones. The painting is an abstract portrait of the ICA’s Artistic Director Ekow Eshun, who visited Hodgkin’s studio to sit for the work, and is estimated at £150,000-200,000.

One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved is a new painting donated by Jake and Dinos Chapman (est. £35,000-45,000) from a series based on eighteenth and nineteenth century aristocratic portraits, doctored by the brothers to include ghoulish deformations. Other works from this series were included in a recent exhibition at White Cube.

Domain by Antony Gormley (est. £100,000-150,000) has been created specifically for the ICA auction and forms part of the Domain series which the artist started in 1999, a breakthrough in sculpture that substitutes space and light for mass and structure and described by Gormley as “an attempt to separate the subtle from the material body, to abstract an attitude and expose it to light and space.”

Posted: 10|12|08 at 9:27 am. Filed under: UK News.