View of the National Portrait Gallery via The Telegraph
At St Martin's Place, London, the National Portrait Gallery is home to the world's largest collection of portraits dating from the Middle Ages to today. This expansive collection features more than 11,000 total portraits, including 4,000 paintings and 7,000 works on paper.
Phillips is proud to be part of this renowned institution's Portrait Gala 2017 as part of our global program of Arts Partnerships, continuing our commitment to the world's leading cultural institutions. Below, explore the curated selection of artworks, experiences and commission opportunities that will be presented during NPG's gala on Tuesday 28 March.
Lot 1: Antony Gormley Site XV, 2016. Estimate £15,000 – £25,000
Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. Gormley's work has been shown widely, with exhibitions spanning Florence, Rio de Janeiro, Hamburg and London since 2007. Having won multiple awards including the Turner Prize, Gormley was made an Officer of the British Empire in 1997 and a Knight in 2014.
He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003.
The winning bidder on this lot will secure Antony Gormley's original work Site XV, which represents the body as an abstracted element, addressing fundamental questions about the nature of existence and our place in an unfathomable universe.
Lot 2: Luc Tuymans Untitled (Mount Rushmore), 2015. Estimate: £20,000 – £30,000
Luc Tuymans is widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential painters working today. Drawing on found images and photographs, his work deals with how history and memory are translated into paint and how we perceive people and things. In 2001, the artist represented Belgium at the 49th Venice Biennale. He has exhibited his work internationally and curated shows for museums including the Royal Academy, London, the National Art Museum of China, Beijing and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, among others.
In 2012, Tuymans donated his portrait of Her Majesty Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. He lives and works in Antwerp. A catalogue raisonné of the artist's paintings, which will illustrate and document approximately 500 paintings from 1975 to the present day, is currently being edited by Eva Meyer Hermann in collaboration with Studio Luc Tuymans, David Zwirner Gallery and Yale University Press — the first volume to be published this autumn.
Up for auction at the National Portrait Gallery will be an original gouache on paper by Tuymans, Untitled (Mount Rushmore), 2015.
As detailed by Collin Chinnery of Edinburgh's Talbot Rice Gallery in 2015, Tuymans seems to paint "snapshots of his memories, the everyday and mundane America that hides an unbelievable potential for violence." One of his most notable works in oil, The Heritage VII, 1996 was painted in the wake of the Oklahoma City Bombing, the largest act of domestic terrorism on U.S. soil. What is peculiar and notable about Untitled (Mount Rushmore) is how Tuymans painted Thomas Jefferson, the man who drafted the Declaration of Independence, with his face "cleaved in two."
Lot 3: Commission a 3D portrait by Gillian Wearing as part of the series 'Posing with Gillian'. Estimate: £5,000 – £7,000
Gillian Wearing OBE is a Turner Prize-winning conceptual artist and Royal Academician, known for her works in photography and film. Wearing describes her working method as "editing life": using photography and video to record people's confessions, her work explores the disparities between individual and collective experience, drawing on fly-on-the-wall documentaries, reality TV and techniques of theatre to explore how we present ourselves to the world. Wearing has exhibited extensively internationally, and is represented by Maureen Paley, London, Tanya Bonakdar, New York and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
'Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask', currently on display in the Wolfson Gallery, was organised in collaboration with Wearing and brings together for the first time her work alongside that of the French Surrealist artist Claude Cahun.
The winning bidder on this lot will be able to commission Gillian Wearing to create a unique 3D portrait as part of the artist's series 'Posing with Gillian'. He or she will visit a 3D studio with the artist and pose together for a full-length double portrait.
Lot 4: A Portrait Workshop at Jonathan Yeo's Studio. Estimate: £2,500 – £3,500
Jonathan Yeo is a British artist, well known for his portraits of George Bush, Tony Blair, Malala Yousafzai, Damien Hirst and Helena Bonham Carter, among others. Yeo is entirely self-taught. His work has been exhibited all over the world and he has had retrospectives at the National Portrait Gallery (2013) and other museums in the U.K. and overseas.
In 2016, Yeo's series of paintings of Cara Delevingne was exhibited at the Museum of National History in Denmark, and his portrait of Kevin Spacey in the role of President Frank Underwood was unveiled at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.
The winning bidder on this gala lot 4 will be invited to bring a group of up to six people for a half-day visit to Yeo's central London studio, where they will enjoy the rare opportunity to observe the techniques the artist has perfected over the years. The group will tour the space and take away signed copies of two recent museum publications.
Lot 5: Sponsor a star work as part of the Gallery's Coming Home Project. Multiple sponsorship opportunities available
The National Portrait Gallery has been collecting portraits of the men and women who have made a significant contribution to British life and history since 1856. The Coming Home project will allow these individuals to return to the places that are special to them. Over a period of three years, this project will enable thirty portraits to return to thirty places in the U.K., giving visitors the opportunity to celebrate and rediscover their local heroes.
William Shakespeare associated with John Taylor, oil on canvas, feigned oval, circa 1600-1610
This will also provide communities with a stronger connection to a bigger national history and will enable portraits of sitters such as Sir Walter Raleigh to return to Dorset, the Brontë Sisters to Yorkshire and David Beckham to Essex.
By supporting this project, donors will allow the Gallery to interpret its Collection in new ways as part of a national program. The National Portrait Gallery hopes to raise £50,000 for this important project.
Lot 6: Commission a portrait by Alessandro Raho. Estimate: £10,000 – £12,000
The renowned British artist Alessandro Raho emerged as part of the YBA phenomenon of the 1990s, just one year after graduating from Goldsmiths. He was the youngest artist in an exhibition launching the YBAs in America at the Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis, showing alongside artists such as Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas. In 2015 he was chosen by the Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey to exhibit at the iconic Secession, Vienna, one of the original haunts of Gustav Klimt.
Raho has gained critical acclaim as a truly contemporary portrait painter, his style being immediately recognizable by the pure white backgrounds against which he presents his subjects. Raho has painted many notable figures in addition to Bryan Ferry, including Michael Craig-Martin and Alex Katz. Raho's portrait of Dame Judi Dench, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in 2005, is one of the Gallery's most requested works for reproduction. In addition to NPG, Raho's work has been acquired by many museums including Tate London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis.
The winning bidder will secure a rare opportunity to sit for a portrait commission by Alessandro Raho, who will photograph and paint them. The commission offered for auction would be a head format, similar to that of Bryan Ferry, as illustrated above.
The commission, based in the U.K., is courtesy of Alessandro Raho and Alison Jacques Gallery, London.