SWEET AS SUGAR

SWEET AS SUGAR

Successful contemporary art auction at Dorotheum

The latest installation by Kenny Scharf, who was born in 1958 and socialised in New York's 1980s East Village scene, is titledVaxi Nation. The artist cooperated with DIOR for the 2021 Men Fall Collection. His large format from 2008-2009, influenced by pop and comics aesthetics, topped the sales at Dorotheum's contemporary art sale on 1 December 2021. An international bidder on the telephone offered 428,000 euros for the artist's brightly coloured "Sugar".

This auction saw many hefty bids, especially for art from the 1950s. This includes George Mathieu's calligraphy-inspired Informalist work "Uranus II" from 1953, which fetched 353,000 euros. Arnulf Rainer's "Black Overpainting", begun in the same year as "an accumulation of 20,000 gestures of crossing-out", realized 215,500 euros. Works by Austrian artists, including Martha Jungwirth, Hermann Nitsch, Max Weiler and Otto Muehl, were knocked down at prices that far exceeded expectations.