The Italian bank UniCredit, which has an art collection of 60,000 works, is planning to sell 312 works in an effort to raise €50m to fund a Social Impact Banking initiative. The first tranche of works is coming to market during the Frieze week sales in London in two weeks. Christie’s will be selling 33 works with a combined low estimate of £14m. The most valuable works—accounting for nearly £12m in low estimate— are two Gerhard Richter paintings and an Yves Klein sponge.

Here’s Christie’s release on the upcoming sale:

UniCredit has appointed Christie’s to manage the sale of artworks from Austria, Germany and Italy. The proceeds will be primarily used to support the further roll-out of the group’s Social Impact Banking (SIB) initiatives. The remaining balance will be dedicated to other relevant projects, including the support of young artists.

The artworks will be offered at various Christie’s international salerooms across a range of marquee week sales in 2019 and 2020, with the first pieces being auctioned in London on 4 and 5 October as part of the Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening and Day Auctions alongside Thinking Italian, taking place during Frieze Week. The selection will include works by Gerhard Richter, Yves Klein, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Enrico Castellani, Sam Francis, Andreas Gursky and Nam June Paik among others.

Further details of these lots can be found here. Information regarding works being offered in future auctions will be announced in due course.

Social Impact Banking is part of UniCredit’s commitment to building a fairer and more inclusive society. It aims to identify, finance and promote people and companies that can have a positive social impact. As well as continuing to provide credit to projects and organisations not usually served by the traditional banking sector, UniCredit employees educate micro-entrepreneurs, social enterprises and vulnerable or disadvantaged groups, building valuable networks within our communities. SIB also focuses on
monitoring and measuring outcomes, essential for sustainable growth. It is currently being rolled out in 10 additional UniCredit markets, including: Germany, Austria, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Richard Weisman, the son of noted Los Angeles collectors Frederick and Marcia Weisman, commissioned Andy Warhol to do a series of portraits of sports stars in the late 1970s. Christie’s will be selling Weisman’s $15m art collection—including works by Norman Rockwell, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, James Rosenquist and Mel Ramos—through Christie’s sales in New York this fall in the categories of Post-War & Contemporary Art, American Art, and Latin American Art, as well as an online-only sale of Picasso Ceramics. Additional sales in 2020 will offer works in the categories of Modern British Art and Photographs. In the November sales, the ten-lot consignment of the Warhol portraits will appear.

Here’s Christie’s release:

Andy Warhol’s Athletes will be sold in Christie’s November sales. They are multi-colored 40 x 40-inch acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas portraits that depict the most iconic sports stars of the 1970s. Being among the inner circle of Warhol’s Factory, Richard Weisman knew the artist well when he approached him to produce Athletes as a series of paintings completed between 1977 and 1979.|

The series features images of Muhammad Ali (boxing, estimate $4,000,000 – 6,000,000), Chris Evert (tennis, estimate: $250,000 – 350,000), Jack Nicklaus (golf, estimate: $200,000 – 300,000), Tom Seaver (baseball, $150,000 – 250,000), Willie Shoemaker (horse racing, $250,000 – 350,000), Dorothy Hamill (figure skating, estimate: $250,000 – 350,000), Pelé(soccer, estimate: $400,000 – 600,000), OJ Simpson (football, estimate: $250,000 – 350,000),Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (basketball, estimate: $300,000 – 500,000), and Vitas Gerulaitis (tennis, estimate:$200,000 – 300,000).

“I chose the sports stars,” Weisman noted of his role in selecting the sports stars that would be featured. “Andy didn’t really know the difference between a football and a golf ball.” Using his Polaroid Big Shot camera, Warhol took each of the photographs himself. Eventually, these works appeared in magazines and billboards across the nation promoting everything from sportswear to cars and breakfast cereals. “The sports stars of today are the movie stars of yesterday,” Warhol later noted.

Bonhams is featuring works by Dubuffet, Zao Wou-ki, David Hockney, Serge Poliakoff, Lucio Fontana, Alighiero Boetti and Tony Cragg. Cragg is represented by two versions of the same work. Constant Change (above) is being offered with a £450k low estimate. The 2005 stands over 14 feet tall and comprises two stainless steel columns. Also on offer is a wooden maquette of the work that is only three feet tall and priced at a bargain £80k.

Here’s the release from Bonhams:

Constant Change (2005), a monumental sculpture by Sir Tony Cragg CBE RA, will be offered at Bonhams Post-War & Contemporary Sale, on Thursday 3 October, at its London New Bond Street saleroom. This spectacular example of his work will lead the sale with an estimate of £450,000-650,000.

Cragg (b. 1949) created Constant Change in 2005. Standing over 4.5 metres tall, the sculpture is the largest work by the artist ever to appear at auction with the two, highly polished, stainless steel columns towering over viewers.

Cragg’s exceptional work has garnered global critical acclaim over the years, and his most prominent achievements include representing Britain at the 1988 Venice Biennale, and winning the Turner Prize the same year. In 1995 he was elected a Royal Academician and he was awarded a CBE for services to art in 2002.

The sale also includes a wooden maquette of Constant Change, a fifth of the size of the full-scale final piece, at 95cm high. The maquette has an estimate of £80,000 – 120,000.

Other highlights include:

Jean Dubuffet (French, 1901-1985) Cafetière V, 1965. Estimate: £500,000 – 700,000.

Zao Wou-Ki (Chinese/French, 1921-2013) 23-9-70, 1970. Estimate: £400,000 – 600,000.

David Hockney (British, born 1937) Hollywood Pool and Palm Tree, 1965. Estimate: £250,000 – 350,000.

Serge Poliakoff (Russian/French, 1900-1969) Composition abstraite, 1964. Estimate: £250,000 – 350,000.

Lucio Fontana (Italian, 1899-1968) Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1960. Estimate: £250,000 – 350,000.

Alighiero Boetti (Italian, 1940-1994) Oggi il trentesimo del quarto mese uno nove otto nove, 1989. Estimate: £200,000 – 300,000.

The big event in Hong Kong early next month is Sotheby’s sale of Sanyu’s last nude. Painted in 1965, the work—one of his largest nudes—carries no published estimate but Sotheby’s is pushing a whisper number of 150m HKD ($19m) which would be a record price for the artist. The current record was set in 2011 when a painting of five nudes sold for $16.5m at Ravenel in Hong Kong.

Here’s Sotheby’s release:

Sotheby’s Hong Kong is proud to present Sanyu’s Nu, the ultimate masterpiece created by the Chinese émigré artist in France in the 1960s, at the Modern Art Evening Sale on 5 October. Painted at the height of his artistic maturity, this last nude by Sanyu is also the artist’s final masterpiece and the definitive expression of his singular vision. Extensively illustrated in every catalogue of Sanyu’s oil paintings, Nu was the cover image of the invitation to the artist’s final solo exhibition. Appearing on the market for the first time in more than half a century, this exceedingly rare work is set to cause tremendous excitement among collectors in Asia and beyond.

Vinci Chang, Sotheby’s Head of Modern Asian Art, comments: “Sanyu’s paintings began with floral motifs and culminated with female nudes. Throughout his life, the artist strove to distil his creative vision, a process that reached its zenith with Nu, his final masterpiece. This season, we are honoured to offer Sanyu’s last nude painting, which has dazzled and captivated viewers for half a century, and to present a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire a work that stands at the pinnacle of the artist’s career.”

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Sotheby’s is mixing the spectacle of politics with the spectacle of auctions this October with a 13-foot wide Banksy painting called Devolved Parliament (2009). Beyond the timely Brexit-adjacent mockery, the sale gets added puissance from being the anniversary of last year’s surprise self-destruction of a Banksy piece on the walls of Sotheby’s auction rooms. The size of the painting and the timing of the sale probably play a factor in the estimate which would put the work with buyer’s premium above the existing record for a Banksy work set more than a decade ago in a charity auction at Sotheby’s.

Here’s Sotheby’s release on the sale:

Banksy’s derisive portrayal of The House of Commons reduced to an assembly of parliamentary primates, will go on public display in London for the first time at Sotheby’s just a mile away from The Palace of Westminster. The exhibition will run from September 28 – October 3, ahead of the next scheduled ‘Brexit Day’. Spanning an impressive thirteen feet, this is the largest known canvas by the anonymous street artist whose subversive practice has granted him a reputation of infamy as much as world renown.

The exhibition of Devolved Parliament (2009) will be followed by an auction on the evening of October 3, in which the painting is estimated to sell for between £1.5-2 million ($1.8-2.46 million). The sale comes exactly a year after Banksy himself intervened in a Sotheby’s auction, when ‘the nation’s favourite artwork’ Girl with Balloon auto-destructed as the gavel came down on 5 October 2018, to become the freshly titled Love is in the Bin, marking the first time an artwork has been created during a live sale.

Born and bred in Bristol in 1973, artist-provocateur Banksy has become an international phenomenon for his dissident style, dark humour, and political commentary on all aspects of contemporary life – from the European immigration crisis, to climate change, the treatment of refugees, and most recently Brexit and the European Union.

His work fits firmly into the venerable history of political parody, from William Hogarth’s portrayal of the controversy, corruption and chaos of 18th-century, to George Orwell’s revolutionary Animal Farm and the political cartoonists of today. In the artist’s own words: “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” (a play on American satirist Finley Peter Dunne’s declaration that the duty of a newspaper is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”)

Banksy first unveiled Devolved Parliament a decade ago as part of his ground-breaking Banksy vs. Bristol Museum exhibition, which famously drew over 300,000 visitors to become one of the world’s top ten most-visited shows of 2019. More recently, the painting returned to the spotlight once again for another showing in Bristol to mark the date originally intended for “Brexit Day”, March 29 2019. The artist took to Instagram at the time to explain: “I made this ten years ago. Bristol museum have just put it back on display to mark Brexit day. “Laugh now, but one day no-one will be in charge”.

Banksy’s Instagram recalls the first appearance of chimpanzees in his work, Laugh Now (2002), a painting which made headlines when it broke the artist’s auction record in 2008. Measuring six-metres long, the painting shows a row of subservient apes wearing aprons carrying the inscription ‘Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge’. The motif has since become one of Banksy’s most widely disseminated images. As the artist has remarked with characteristically dry wit: “You paint 100 chimpanzees and they still call you a guerrilla artist.”

The current auction record for the artist is t $1,870,000, achieved by Keep it Spotless at Sotheby’s New York in 2008.