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 and Gerhard Richter. 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).
