Abstraction, figuration, intimate portraits and monumental projects — highlights of the upcoming Post-War to Present sales

Cecily Brown, The Haunter, 2010

Duality is the central theme of Cecily Brown’s paintings. Her vast canvases are a combination of the abstract and the figurative, of classical and popular culture. Her inspiration comes in many forms: the temptation of Saint Anthony, a Rubens feasting table, the folk tale Straw Peter. ‘These different subjects inevitably end up crossing over one another,’ she says, ‘but ultimately they are rooted in a figurative reality.’ The human figure is very present, even if it is only represented by a swirling mass of energetic brushstrokes. Brown’s dynamic compositions have often been interpreted as a commentary on excess and over-stimulation, The Haunter (2010) is just such a painting. At its heart is a strange supernatural quality, whereby spectral shadows collide with the natural world.

Christo, L’Arc de Triomphe Wrapped (Project for Paris) Place de l’Etoile — Charles de Gaulle, 2020

From wrapping the German parliament in metallic fabric to erecting a 18,600-square-metre orange curtain across a Colorado canyon, the Bulgarian-born artist Christo and his French wife Jeanne-Claude created monumental public works that were magical in their audacity. Paradoxically, the artists often revealed more about a building’s essence by concealing it. Their interventions gave structures a sense of impermanence — something Christo described as ‘anti-monumental’. It took decades to realise many of the couple’s projects, including their 1961 proposal to wrap the Arc de Triomphe in silvery blue fabric and red rope. It was eventually completed in 2021, a few months after Christo’s death. A memento mori for the modern age.

Howardena Pindell, Webb, 2023

When Howardena Pindell graduated from Yale, in the late 1960s, she found herself at odds with a contemporary art world that expected her, as an African-American woman, to produce work directly addressing race and identity. Instead, she pursued abstraction, particularly geometric systems influenced by her father, a mathematics professor. Drawing on Josef Albers’s colour theories, her early works were created by forcing acrylic paint through stencils made with a hole punch. The resulting compositions echoed the Pointillism of Georges Seurat. Yet Pindell’s abstractions carried subtle political weight: the circle was used in parts of the American South to enforce segregation. Pindell liberated it from such a context.

Nan Goldin, Trixie on the cot, NYC, 1979

The American artist Nan Goldin is known for her unflinching photographs of New York’s underworld. Her work combines poetic intimacy with raw, uncompromising directness: ‘I use photography to get through my fears,’ she has said. This image depicts Trixie, a member of the transgender community in the East Village. Goldin arrived in New York in the late 1970s, drawn to the post-punk, New Wave scene, and lived in a Bowery loft known for drug use and parties. She photographed everything — debauched nights out, friends having sex, moments of vulnerability. These later formed her groundbreaking slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. By the mid-1990s, many of her friends had died as a result of the AIDS epidemic, and Goldin has spoken of survivor’s guilt, processed through her photography.

Stanley Whitney, Untitled, 2016

The colour field painter Stanley Whitney once said that all he was doing with his paintings was ‘trying to address being human’. There is a woozy rhythm to the Philadelphia-born artist’s vibrant abstractions, thrumming to the free-form jazz of Sun Ra. Whitney’s oil paint is diluted to give it a transparency that contrasts with the retina-blast of yellows, reds and greens he uses. Space, light, colour and architecture are Whitney’s key considerations; his paintings are about keeping these elements alive and vital within the condensed space of the canvas. The results are grids of pure colour that evoke earlier modernists such as Mondrian and Malevich.

Sterling Ruby, TURBINE.IRIDES, 2022

Gesture is the starting point for Sterling Ruby’s large-scale canvases. The artist works on an operatic scale, producing paintings that feel both expansive and controlled. ‘I’ve always been attracted to the idea that space creates and controls mood and behaviour,’ he has said. Having studied during a period when Abstract Expressionism was considered unfashionable, he responds against the idea that painting must be entirely premeditated. In TURBINE.IRIDES, an inverted V in vibrant, Miró-like colours rises skyward, evoking wind, flame and spray, and suggesting elemental forces in motion.

Post-War to Present is on view 18-24 June 2026 at Christie’s in London, alongside Post-War to Present: Online, which is live for bidding from 18 June to 2 July