Grisebach is delighted to present a selection for its upcoming Winter Auctions that is more diverse and international than ever before. On 26 and 27 November, a total of 275 works will go under the hammer in Berlin, of which – for the first time in Grisebach’s history – more than half were created after 1945. On offer are works by Per Kirkeby, Wojciech Fangor and Bernar Venet, by František Kupka and Maurizio Cattelan, by Jesús Rafael Soto, Andy Warhol, Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana.
One of the highlights of this year’s autumn auctions is Yves Klein’s ‘Untitled Shroud Anthropometry, (ANT SU 30)’ from 1960 (press release dated 6 October 2026). The French artist’s work will be offered in the ‘Selected Works’ sale on 26 November. This exceptional work, titled ‘Anthropométries Suaires’ in French, is estimated at between 2 and 3 million euros. The painting is one of the very few works from this highly prominent series by Yves Klein still in private hands.
Its provenance is also noteworthy: Klein gifted the ‘Anthropométrie’ to the Swiss filmmaker Yvan Butler, who documented his 1961 exhibition ‘Monochrome und Feuer’ at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld. The history of the work is thus closely linked to the Rhineland art scene of those years – and to the milieu of the fledgling ZERO movement. In 1985, the museum piece was acquired from the renowned Gallery 44 in Kaarst near Düsseldorf by a private collection in North Rhine-Westphalia, where it has remained ever since.
In 1960, the year the work was created, Klein presented his ‘Anthropometries’ to the public for the first time. Klein was not interested in depicting bodies; his focus was on their immediate physical presence in the process of creating the image. This work belongs to a small group of around 30 pieces which – unlike the well-known performative ‘Anthropometries’ – were conceived by Klein as static contact prints.
The Wulf Herzogenrath Collection at Grisebach
Another highlight of the Winter Auctions at Grisebach is the sale of works from the Herzogenrath Collection (press release dated 1 October 2026). Wulf Herzogenrath, long-standing director of the Kölnischer Kunstverein and a member of the curatorial team for Documenta 6 and Documenta 8, was appointed chief curator of the Berlin National Gallery in 1989. In 1994, Herzogenrath took up the post of director at the Kunsthalle Bremen.
The collection, drawn from the estate of the art historian who died in June 2026, comprises a curated selection of 107 paintings, watercolours, prints, sculptures and installations by artists such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, John Cage and Nam June Paik (with whom Herzogenrath was a close friend), Paula Modersohn-Becker, Arthur Segal, László Péri and Marcel Duchamp. The median total estimate for this personal ‘puzzle’ belonging to one of the finest connoisseurs of 20th-century art stands at around 1.7 million euros.
The works will be offered both on 26 November in the ‘Selected Works’ auction and on 27 November in the ‘Modern Art’ and ‘Contemporary Art’ auctions. In addition, a separate online sale dedicated to the Herzogenrath Collection will take place from 20 November to 13 December. A catalogue featuring texts and additional images, dedicated to Wulf Herzogenrath’s collection and its complex connections and cross-references, will be published to accompany the sale.
An overview of further highlights from the Winter Auctions
Marianne von Werefkin’s painting ‘Der Schnitter’ is outstanding in terms of quality. Painted around 1910, the work is one of those that established Werefkin as a full member of the ‘Blauer Reiter’ artists’ group. Together with Gabriele Münter, Wassily Kandinsky and Alexej von Jawlensky, the painter had spent the summer months in Murnau in the Alpine foothills since 1908 – all four underwent decisive artistic developments there. Through its reduction of forms to the bare essentials and its striking triad of colours – blue, yellow and green – Marianne von Werefkin’s ‘Der Schnitter’ is a major work of Expressionism on the threshold of abstraction (EUR 400,000/600,000).
Andy Warhol had been creating serial portraits since the early 1960s, but this one stands out for a particular reason: the portraits he produced of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin were the last ones he created before his death on 22 February 1987. The painting, which has been in the family’s possession for almost forty years and is now being auctioned at Grisebach, is one of the rare examples in a deep monochrome red. Warhol based it on a historical photograph showing Lenin – then still known by his birth name, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov – around 1897, surrounded by a group of young revolutionaries from the ‘St Petersburg League for the Liberation of the Working Class’, of which Lenin had been one of the founders (EUR 350,000/450,000).
Lucio Fontana created his first ‘Concetto spaziale’ in 1949. In doing so, he opened a new, hitherto entirely unknown chapter in art history. The vividly coloured ‘Concetto spaziale’ from 1966/67, which Grisebach will auction on 26 November, belongs to the ‘Olii’ series. The form of the intervention in the canvas, which can be seen on it, is very rare. Much more common are fine, long incisions, either individually or in groups side by side. Here, however, the artist worked on the centre of the painting until a larger opening formed – it resembles a crater on the surface of the moon. Katharina Hegewisch described it aptly when she wrote about Fontana: ‘His art is conceptual, controlled and scientifically oriented. But it is also wild, sensual and baroque.’ (EUR 300,000/400,000).
Depictions of animals featured prominently in Ewald Mataré’s oeuvre, yet he rarely produced a work as enchanting as this wooden sculpture of a standing horse. Crafted in 1930 from amaranth wood and inspired by his travels to Finland (which the artist undertook regularly from 1927 onwards), the figure exudes a sense of light, elegant movement. The tension in the sculptural form runs from the compact tail and the staggered hind legs, through the slender torso, to the long, tapering neck, on which rests a head turned curiously to one side. The sculpture’s provenance includes the Henkel and Schulz-Dornburg collections, which are among the most prominent German collections (EUR 200,000/300,000).
Bernar Venet’s sculpture ‘222.5° ARC x 4’ is also of exceptional quality. In the 1960s, the French sculptor was based in New York. There he became acquainted with figures from the Minimalist and Conceptual art movements such as Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin. Their ideas influenced his work, though he adapted their principles to suit his own vision. Unlike the Americans, chance, variability and the element of the indeterminate also played decisive roles for Venet. ‘222.5° ARC x 4’ impressively illustrates Venet’s engagement with mathematical systems, geometric forms and the material conditions of sculpture, which he translates into a distinct artistic language: Four arches of rolled steel, each forming an angle of exactly 222.5 degrees, form an elegant, monumental structure (EUR 250,000/350,000).
A spectacular rediscovery is the proto-symbolist painting ‘A Mermaid’ by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann (1819–1881). Born in Warsaw to a German entrepreneur and a Polish mother, Elisabeth Baumann moved to Düsseldorf as a young woman to study painting at the city’s art academy. In the 1840s, during a three-year stay in Rome, she became friends with the writer and poet Hans Christian Andersen, married the Danish sculptor Jens Adolf Jerichau and lived in Copenhagen from then on. Elisabeth Baumann had shown great talent for painting from an early age (her parents regarded her as the ‘new Angelika Kauffmann’); later, Queen Victoria arranged for her to hold a solo exhibition at Buckingham Palace. The painting ‘A Mermaid’ from 1847/61, inspired by Andersen’s famous fairy tale ‘The Little Mermaid’, is one of her masterpieces (EUR 250,000/400,000).
A total of 275 works of art, with a combined lower estimate of around 15 million euros, will be auctioned across three sessions at the winter auctions on 26 and 27 November. With a collection that is as diverse as it is international, ranging from Classical Modernism to the contemporary era, the Winter Auctions at Grisebach are setting new trends.
The preview of all works in Berlin, at two venues on Fasanenstraße (numbers 25 and 27), will take place from 19 to 24 November.