The Best of Bonhams is on show at 22 Queen Street. The annual exhibition, staged to celebrate this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, showcases highlights from Bonhams autumn and winter sales across the UK.
The exhibition includes a huge Rodin bronze L’un des Bourgeois de Calais : Étude de nu monumental pour Pierre de Wissant with green black patina cast as a limited run of 11 in 1972. It is offered from the celebrated Sydney collection of Sir Warwick and Lady Fairfax
The selling price for the piece (and believe us when we tell you that you will need a monumental space as well as wallet) is somewhere around the half a million pounds mark.
Slightly more manageable and a delight to look at is The Three Graces, a candelabra by master silversmith Simon Benney, which is the single most valuable piece of modern contemporary design silver to come to auction. The commissioned work, which took more than two years to complete, has an estimate of £250,000-300,000.
In our photo the candelabra sit on a Linley table in Bonhams showroom in Queen Street. This exhibition is free to access.
The Frink sculpture is a little more manageable and would not take up just quite as huge a space. Created by Dame Elisabeth Frink R.A. (British, 1930-1993) Chinese Horse III is a lovely piece.
A work in acrylic and mixed media on canvas by Aboudia Abdoulaye Diarrassouba an Ivorian artist born 1983 is very much more contemporary. The artist works in Brooklyn and Abidjan on the Ivory Coast. His work initially focused on the surrounding streets with children being his main subjects. “I feel close to them because when I decided to get involved in art my family was against it and I left my home and lived alone. The Abobo railway station has always been a source of inspiration because it is a living and popular place. Many marginalized kids meet there. Because I noticed that these kids drew upon the neighbourhood walls to express what was deep within them, it occurred to me – because I had also been there – to try and retransmit the message portrayed by their pictures on canvas.”
And then more familiar to many of us in Edinburgh is the work of Antony Gormley RA (born 1950). This smallish piece in comparison with the Gormleys which we know and love in the Water of Leith is being sold to benefit the Saturday Club Trust.
Almost all of Gormley’s work uses the human body and this MEME CCCLXXXVIII is in cast iron. He says his work is “an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all iive.”
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
