Sotheby's has announced that its Contemporary Art Evening Sale - the first major auction in the category this year - will be highlighted by Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Self Portrait.
The piece, a triptych which forms part of a series of 11 such works, will sell with a £10m-15m ($16-24m) estimate on February 12 in New York. It has been consigned to auction from the collection of a distinguished European collector.
 The death of Bacon's closest friend had a profound impact on his work |
Sotheby's chairman of contemporary art Europe, Cheyenne Westphal, commented on the contemporary art market: "The marketplace and demand for contemporary art has never been stronger or more international - of the top 20 prices achieved by Sotheby's last year, more than half were post-war and contemporary masterworks."
The Bacon piece leads a line-up of what Sotheby's describes as "powerful masterworks of extraordinary 'wall power' by blue-chip artists". Self-portraiture played an important role in Bacon's career, with the death of his closest friend, George Dyer, launching a series of "searing self-analyses" that were executed throughout the remainder of his life.
Painted in 1980, the triptych is one such work, a haunting trio of portraits that are almost one to one scale. Powerfully executed, Three Studies for a Self-Portrait "truly counts as a masterpiece of Bacon's intimately scaled triptychs", according to Sotheby's.
Bacon's Study for Self-Portrait - featuring the artist's head on Lucien Freud's body - sold for £19.2m in June 2012. The current world record for his work was set at $86.3m in 2008, after Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich successfully outbid contenders for Bacon's Triptych 1976.
 Richter became the world's most valuable living artist in 2012, with thanks to Eric Clapton |
Also featuring is Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild (769-1), which is expected to bring £7.5-9.5m ($12m-15m). Richter is currently the world's most valuable living artist after another piece from his Abstraktes Bild series, from the collection of Eric Clapton, sold for $34.2m in October - a 77.6% increase on estimate.
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