On November 12 in New York, Christie's will offer Mark Rothko's Untitled (No. 11) as part of its Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale.
 The painting hails from a key year in Rothko's career and bears all the hallmarks of his finest works |
The piece is valued at $25m-35m. It follows on from Christie's sale of Rothko's Orange, Red, Yellow in May 2012, which set a new world record for the artist at $86.9m - a 93.1% increase on its $35m-45m estimate.
The present work has been in the same collection for two decades, having been acquired at Christie's in 1992. It has since been featured in major retrospectives of Rothko's work, including the seminal exhibits at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the Neue National-Galeries in Dusseldorf and The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York.
"The demand for masterworks by Rothko is probably the most international amongst all the artists we sell, with strong bidding consistently from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Russia and the Middle-East," commented Christie's head of contemporary art, Brett Gorvy.
"Untitled (No. 11) is remarkable for its incredible beauty, intensity of colour and inner light - the very hallmarks of Rothko's prime period. The monumental scale allows viewers to be completely enveloped by the colours and its sensations,"
The piece hails from 1957, the height of Rothko's mature period. It is part of a short series of similar works painted during the year, which are the last of Rothko's brightly coloured pieces.
Rothko's work joins a triptych from Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol's Coca-Cola (3) as the star lots of the sale.
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