£9.8m de Kooning Leads Sotheby’s London Contemporary Evening Sale

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Following Christie’s £218.6 million London evening sales earlier this week, yesterday Sotheby’s held its Contemporary Evening Auction on New Bond Street, raising £46 million—just shy of last year’s total.

Willem de Kooning’s Untitled (1977) led the sale at £9.8 million (all prices include fees), against an estimate of £8 million–£12 million, setting a European auction high for the artist. The result coincides with the opening of Willem de Kooning at work, a major exhibition placing drawing at the centre of his practice at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Untitled was created after de Kooning returned to painting with new intensity in the mid-1970s—1977 in particular was described by critic David Sylvester as the “annus mirabilis of de Kooning’s career”. In the painting, deep cobalt-blue strokes wobble and meander through passages of yellow, red, pink and white, evoking the East Hampton surroundings where he lived. Their uneven course and the thickly worked paint seem to resist the flatness of the canvas.

Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (1992) followed at £6.7 million. First shown at Documenta IX, the painting also appeared in the artist’s 2002 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, and most recently at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2025-26).

Mark Rothko’s large, late Untitled (1969), an acrylic-and-ink work on paper last seen at auction in 1992, achieved £3.8 million. Works by Georg Baselitz, David Hockney, Albert Oehlen, and Andy Warhol rounded out the evening’s top ten sales.

However, the night’s surprises came at lower price points. David Hockney’s 10th–22nd June 2021, Water Lilies in the Pond with Pots of Flowers (2021) achieved £1.9 million against an estimate of £450,000–£650,000, setting an auction record for one of the late artist’s iPad works.

The nearly two-metre composition combines six iPad paintings across two sheets. A blue grid divides the pond, foliage and potted flowers into adjacent views, carrying the immediacy of digital drawing into an expanded landscape.

Michael Andrews’s Butterfly Fish (1978) produced the evening’s sharpest rise, achieving £704,000 against an estimate of £80,000–£120,000 and setting an auction record for a work on paper by the artist. The intimate-scale acrylic work dates from the period of Andrews’s four School paintings, which explored a parallel between schoolchildren and fish moving together in water.

In total the evening should have included 37 works, although three—one each by Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, and Leon Kossoff—were withdrawn ahead of the sale. Ten works went under the hammer with a guarantee and four went unsold, including Gerhard Richter’s Grauer Spiegel (Gray Mirror) (1992), which had a high estimate of £1 million and Head of a Girl (Fragment) (circa 1992) by Lucian Freud, which had a high estimate of £700,000.