Adrian Ghenie’s painting ‘The Sunflowers in 1937’ sold for 3,117,000 pounds sterling in a Sotheby’s auction on Wednesday, in London. It was an all-time record for the Romanian painter, the house mentioned on its website.
The large oil-on-canvas work is inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s iconic sunflowers. It was estimated between 400,000 and 600,000 pounds sterling. It belonged to the Galerie Judin of Berlin, who had purchased it from the artist.
‘The Sunflowers in 1937’ was part of the painter’s ‘2014 Berlin Noir’ exhibition at Galerie Judin, a memento of the Nazi campaign against art deemed ‘degenerate’ in the Third Reich.
Two more paintings by Ghenie are on auction on Thursday at Sotheby’s. ‘Untitled (Elena Ceausescu)’, a portrait of former Romanian Communist dictator’s wife, is estimated at 60,000 to 80,000 pounds.
Ghenie, born in 1997 in Baia Mare (northwestern Romania), has works in several museums throughout the world, including the Centre Pompidou of Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles, and the SMAK (Municipal Museum of Modern Art) of Ghent, Belgium. He represented Romania in the 2015 Biennale of Venice, Italy with a project styled ‘Darwin’s Room’. More…