Tonight, Sotheby’s London Contemporary Art Evening Auction brought the strong total of £74,364,200/ $116,357,664/ €86,321,943, within pre-sale expectations (estimate: £61.2-84.5 million), representing Sotheby’s second-highest total for a February Sale of Contemporary Art in London.
The top lot of the evening’s sale was Francis Bacon’s 1980 oil on canvas triptych masterwork Three Studies for a Self-Portrait, which sold for £13,761,250 / $21,532,228 / €15,974,055 against an estimate of £10-15 million. Executed in the artist’s eighth decade at the age of 71 it belongs to a corpus of 11 triptych self-portraits in Bacon’s standard 14by12 inch format. The work was acquired by a German collector Jürgen Hall who will generously loan the work to a major international institution.
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