Christie's is a British auction house founded in 1766 by James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's in London, at Rockefeller Center in New York City and at Alexandra House in Hong Kong. It is owned by Groupe Artémis, the holding company of François-Henri Pinault. Sales in 2015 totalled £4.8 billion. In 2017, the Salvator Mundi was sold for $400 million at Christie's in New York, at the time the highest price ever paid for a single painting at an auction.
Sotheby's is a British-founded American multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, but maintains a significant presence in the UK.
Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German artists and several of his works have set record prices at auction.
Sigmar Polke was a German painter and photographer.
An art auction or fine art auction is the sale of art works, in most cases in an auction house.
Blinky Palermo was a German abstract painter.
The Holy Virgin Mary is a painting created by Chris Ofili in 1996. It was one of the works included in the Sensation exhibition in London, Berlin and New York in 1997–2000. The subject of the work, and its execution, caused considerable controversy in New York, with Rudolph Giuliani – then Mayor of New York City – describing Ofili's work as "sick". In 1998, Ofili was the first black artist to be awarded the Turner Prize. The painting was sold for £2.9 million in June 2015.
Mildred Anne Butler was an Irish artist, who worked in watercolour and oil of landscape, genre and animal subjects. Butler was born and spent most of her life in Kilmurry, Thomastown, County Kilkenny and was associated with the Newlyn School of painters.
The Lock is an oil painting by English artist John Constable, finished in 1824. It depicts a rural scene on the River Stour in the English county of Suffolk, one of six paintings within the Six-Footer series. It was auctioned for £22,441,250 at Christie's in London on 3 July 2012.
Cheyenne Westphal is the chairman of auctioneers Phillips. She was worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby's until April 2016, having joined the firm in 1990. Westphal joined Phillips as Chairman in 2017.
Cathedral Square, Milan is a 1968 painting by Gerhard Richter. The photorealistic painting is one of Richter's largest figurative paintings at 2,75 m x 2,90 m. It depicts Milan's Catherdral Square between the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele and the Milan Cathedral. It was sold by Sotheby's in New York on 14 May 2013 for 37.1 Million dollars, breaking Richter's own record price for an artwork by a living artist, his 1994 32.4 million dollar painting Abstraktes Bild (809-1).
The Cologne Cathedral Window is the stained glass window in the south transept of the Cologne Cathedral designed by Cologne artist Gerhard Richter. On a surface of 106 square metres 11.263 glass squares in 72 colours of 9,6 cm × 9.6 cm were principally arranged randomly, with others selected in response to architectural context. The window was inaugurated on August 25, 2007 as part of a Eucharistic celebration; the abstract execution was both celebrated and strongly criticized.
Nu couché is a 1917 painting by Amedeo Modigliani. The painting was included in a 2017/2018 Tate Modern exhibition of Modigliani's works. The painting was sold by auction by Sotheby's in April 2018. Writing in The Guardian, British arts journalist Jonathan Jones compared it to Ingres' 1814 work Grande Odalisque.
Paris, Montparnasse is a colour photograph created by German photographer Andreas Gursky in 1993. The large photograph has the overall dimensions of 210 by 395 cm, and had a five copies edition. A print of the photograph was sold by $2,416,475 at the Sotheby's, London, on 17 October 2013.
Untitled is a painting created by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1982. In May 2021, it sold for $30.2 million at Christie's in Hong Kong.
