Ron Mueck 1996 "Big Baby," est. £800,000 to £1.2 million, via Christie's

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views, Contributor

Christie’s will offer 32 works from the collection of noted British collector Kay Saatchi in its June Post-War and Contemporary art auctions in London. The works are estimated to sell for up to £3.4 million.

Saatchi is moving to Los Angeles after 25 years in London as a major YBA patron. (She and ex-husband, advertising magnate and private museum owner, Charles Saatchi, divorced in 2001.) Read a long profile on Saatchi from the Times London here.

Take heed David Kordansky and Tim Blum: Saatchi is quoted in a Christie’s press release explaining that she plans to sell the U.K. works to make space for West Coast art acquisitions.

Evening sale highlights include Ron Mueck’s life-size, blue-eyed Big Baby sculpture from 1996, estimated to sell for £800,000 to £1.2 million. Kay and Charles Saatchi acquired seven of the hyper-realist sculptor’s earliest works, three of which were on display at the traveling Sensation show during the late 1990s.

Paula Rego’s Looking Back (1987), a large-scale painting of buxom lounging ladies, is estimated to sell for £600,000 – £800,000. The Saatchi duo purchased the work (along with several others) at the Rego show at the Serpentine Gallery in 1988. Charles Saatchi sold the couple’s other Regos privately to Marlborough Gallery in 2009, according to a 2009 FT interview with Rego found here.

Five important works on paper from the 1940s by Lucian Freud are also on the block. The figurative drawings, ranging in subject from sleeping rabbits to dead monkeys and a young boy with a pipe, are estimated to fetch between £80,000 – £400,000.

Twenty-four additional works by Lucian Freud, May Ray, Jodie Carey, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and others will be sold during on June 29th. Estimates range from £5,000 – £40,000.

Saatchi began her career working with renowned dealer Leo Castelli. She married Charles Saatchi in 1990. She is moving to Los Angeles to pursue curatorial projects and promote a new batch of young, local talent, according to Christie’s.