Most expensive painting yet this year to hit market at €400k-€600k

Fluid brush strokes in bands of ochre, orange and charcoal are evocative of the Spanish landscape in Sean Scully’s Raval Rojo. Taking its name from the Catalan Red Ravine, it leads Morgan O’Driscoll’s Irish and International Art auction, an online sale ending April 18th.

From his Wall of Light series, which was inspired by a trip to Mexico, his “exploration of surface, texture and abstract form in these works evokes a range of emotional and narrative themes”, according to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, where Wall of Light Desert Night is part of its permanent collection.

Expected to fetch between €400,000 and €600,000 – the highest estimate for a painting listed in an Irish auction so far this year – it was purchased in 2005 from the Kerlin Gallery by its present owner. It was exhibited at the gallery’s Celebrating the Best of Contemporary Art exhibit in late 2005, and is also featured in Robert O’Byrne’s book, Dictionary of Living Irish Artists, from 2010.

Paul Henry’s A Western Landscape (1919) is a departure from his usual bulbous white clouds and serene blue skies, and the work is said to represent the time when the artist was preparing to leave his beloved Achill Island (€80,000-€120,000). It marks a turning point in his life: “The heaviness of this scene, therefore reflects the artist’s mood at the time and, although he was not then to know, the period also represented the beginning of a decade of financial and domestic difficulties that eventually ended in his separation from Grace in 1930″, according to the late Dr S. B. Kennedy, in catalogue notes.

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Three works by Evie Hone feature, including the superb Cubist Composition (€15,000-€25,000), which was used on the front cover of Donal uí Bhraonáin’s Paidreacha na Gaeilge, Prayers in Irish, a copy of which accompanies the lot.

“Andy Warhol is very collectable at the moment,” says the curator of the sale, Morgan O’Driscoll, of lot 36, a signed and numbered screen print, number 31 from 50 artist proofs of Teddy Roosevelt. Estimated at €50,000-€70,000, O’Driscoll says “two years ago this was worth about €20,000-€25,000, but the last few results of this edit have sold for in excess of €60,000″.

Other contemporary works include Bridget Riley, whose Untitled (1972), is listed at €60,000-€90,000. “Riley is to the UK, what Sean Scully is to Ireland,” says O’Driscoll, who also points out that to purchase a Riley or indeed a Scully in the UK, and to bring it back to Ireland, “can add the guts of 70 per cent on top of the hammer price due to fees, artists resale rights, Irish import duty and exchange rates”.

In sculpture, artists such as John Behan, Rory Breslin and Imogen Stuart are represented, as are works by Lynn Russell Chadwick, whose abstract Seated Dog (€20,000-€25,000) features alongside Dame Elizabeth Frink’s Eagle with Outstretched Wings (€12,000-€15,000), while Northern Ireland’s surrealist sculptor Fredrick McWilliam’s Waking Up Figure, is listed at €8,000-€12,000 – a cast of which was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London in 1989.

morganodriscoll.com