Sotheby’s is wasting no time capitalizing on the strong New York sale of Contemporary art. Today, the auction house announced the Sammlung Lenz Shönberg Collectiong of ‘Zero Art’ as the highlight of the February sales in London. It’s a massive trove of 49 works that carry a combined estimate of £12m with examples of Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Gunther Uecker, Roman Opalka and Victor Vaserly.

Here’s Sotheby’s description of the collection–which was assembled over 50 years–and its importance:

They have assembled a comprehensive collection of 600 works and exhibited them repeatedly with their own funding. In all there have now been thirteen museum exhibitions, including museums in Barcelona, Frankfurt, Madrid, Munich, Moscow, Salzburg and Warsaw. Most important to Mr and Mrs Lenz has been to prove that these artists, of whom there are 50 in all, represent the same point of view while remaining independent of one another – spiritually and effectively presenting a shared consciousness of Europe in artistic terms.

Zero Art is

one of the most significant collaborative movements of Post War art and eventually incorporated the work of Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and Günther Uecker among others.[…] While Klein was included in the seventh ZERO exhibition in April 1958, Fontana and Manzoni contributed to the eighth show the following month. Indeed, ZERO brought together protagonists of pioneering contemporary artistic movements from across Europe, including Nouveau
réalisme and Arte Povera. The ideology of the ZERO group was voiced through its own eponymous magazine, which was published between 1958 and 1961 and included influential texts by Piene, Mack and Klein. These celebrated artists shared the common ambition to abandon art of the past, including Post War Informel painting, and start again from ‘zero’, forging new approaches to creativity and enlisting unprecedented media.