Gerald Laing and Adrian Ghenie Among Christie’s Frieze Sale Highlights

Christie’s has released some of the works to be featured in its October sales in London alongside the Italian sale and the Waddington estate. Two of the works that bear the same estimates are Gerald Laing’s Beach Wear and Adrian Ghenie’s Nickelodeon.

Here’s Christie’s press release entry on the Laing:

Gerald Laing’s Beach Wear (1964; estimate: £1,000,000–1,500,000) is one of the first images of the Pop Art movement and the largest work within Laing’s celebrated early series of ten ‘beach girls’ created between 1964-5. First shown at Richard Feigen Gallery in New York in the year of its creation, it has remained unseen by the public for over fifty years. A monumentally-scaled icon of its time, the work captures the heady glamour of the Swinging Sixties, infused with the zeitgeist of sexual liberation, consumer culture and mass-media that spawned the rise of Pop Art.

Painstakingly rendered by hand, its original pencil gridlines still visible, Laing’s innovative replication of commercial printing techniques, first developed in 1963, had a profound impact upon the international development of Pop, arguably predating Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben Day dots and Sigmar Polke’s.

Here’s what they said about the Ghenie:

Adrian Ghenie is represented in the Post-War and Contemporary Evening Auction with the vast and cinematic vision that is Nickelodeon (2008; estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000) which was the centrepiece of ‘Darkness for an Hour,’ Ghenie’s first UK solo show in 2009. The work, executed on two panels that together span over four metres in width, presents eight figures amid a dark, cavernous interior. These characters tread the boards as if assembled on a spotlit stage, whose planks are dragged viscerally into being with paint pulled across the canvas.