New York auction set to break record for Hockney painting
Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica expected to fetch at least $20m
Here at the Artmarket Gallery, we’ll be watching with great interest when David Hockney’s Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica goes up for auction later this month.
The fabulous painting – 10 feet of the brilliant, saturated colour that the artist does so well – is expected to fetch between $20m and $30m (around £14.5m to £22m) when it sells at a Contemporary Art Evening Auction at Sotheby’s New York on 16 May.
If it reaches its estimate, it’ll break the artist’s record sale of $11,712,500, set at Sotheby’s New York in September 2016.
On the Sotheby’s website, David Galperin, Head of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction, says: “We are honored to bring this exuberant monumental landscape to market for the first time publicly.
"David Hockney’s Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica is a true triumph of his singular vision: a panoramic and kaleidoscopic paean to his adopted hometown. We eagerly anticipate setting a new bar for the artist at auction on the 16th with one of the most well-known paintings of his beloved California.”
But while Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica is a love letter to Hockney’s second home on the sun-drenched East Coast of the States, that earlier record was set for a painting of an East coast much more familiar to many of our customers – Woldgate Woods was painted just up the road, on the more subtly beautiful East Yorkshire Wolds.
Hockney, of course, was Bradford-born, but famously has spent long periods of his life living and working in Bridlington, where his mother lived.
Loving this area as much as we do, we feel a strong affinity with the great man, and his work is hugely popular with our clients – we stock a selection of limited edition prints, as well as the epic A Bigger Book, a huge volume of his work which comes complete with its own bespoke stand.
We also specialise in rare investment prints by Hockney, recently selling Pool Made with Paper and Blue Ink to a client in Los Angeles for $25,000.
Click here for more information on the Sotheby’s auction.