Christie’s will host its 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 14 October 2026, celebrating the revolutionary threads of art-making that have defined this transformative period in history.
Leading the sale are masterworks by two of the leading pioneers of the early twentieth century – Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. Rich in symbolism, Kandinsky’s 1907 composition Das bunte Leben is filled with a kaleidoscopic play of vivid colour and vitalistic energy, and presents a panoramic, romantic view of the often conflicting and contrasting aspects of the human experience – love and loss, joy and sadness, conflict and harmony. Mondrian’s Composition III, meanwhile, offers a contrastingly minimalist vision, reducing his focus to the internal tensions of geometric planes of pure colour set within a linear grid. Painted in 1920, this is a key breakthrough work in Mondrian’s career, showcasing the core principles of his pioneering abstract language known as Neo-Plasticism.
The Post-War and Contemporary selection features major works by artists including Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter and Domenico Gnoli. Many of these come from important private collections, including Property from the Matthys-Colle Collection, The Collection of Senator and Mrs. Thomas F. Eagleton and New Horizons: Property from a West Coast Collection. Other highlights include David Hockney’s painting of his dachshund, Stanley – all the more poignant after the artist’s passing this summer – and a rare, large-scale self-portrait by Albert Oehlen, made in the heady days of 1980s Cologne.
Christie’s is also delighted to present Radiant Modernism: Signac to Albers, a Private European Collection of late-nineteenth to twentieth-century art spanning paintings, works on paper and prints, which will be offered across multiple sales and regions from October 2026 throughout 2027. The collection is debuted in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale with an important group of works by Josef Albers and Paul Signac’s Sainte-Anne (Saint-Tropez) (1905).
