David Walsh, a gambling millionaire who opened a subterranean museum in Tasmania in 2011, is selling four key works by former Young British Artists in London’s contemporary auctions at the end of June. The proceeds will help fund an expansion of the collector’s Museum of Old and New Art to house a number of James Turrell works.
Great Deeds Against the Dead (1994), Jake and Dinos Chapman’s life-size, three-dimensional recreation of a Goya etching, is estimated to fetch between £400,000 and £600,000. The sculpture, made from mutilated male mannequins lassoed to a tree stump, was exhibited as part of Charles Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997.
The work helped thrust the artists into the limelight, although Jake Chapman is characteristically opaque when asked how he now feels about the piece. “I look upon it with the affection of a blind man shopping at the butchers,” he tells The Art Newspaper.
Chris Ofili’s 1996 painting, The Holy Virgin Mary, which was also shown in Sensation and became the centrepiece of a culture war when the exhibition toured to the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, is expected to sell for around £1.5m (a third party has guaranteed a minimum price).
The eight-foot canvas depicts a black Virgin Mary surrounded by images of naked bottoms and encrusted with elephant dung (the manure was reportedly procured by the Chapmans’ sister who worked at London Zoo). Walsh bought the work from Saatchi in 2007.
Walsh is also selling one of the first examples of Damien Hirst’s spin paintings, Beautiful mis-shapen purity clashing excitedly outwards painting (1995), created the same year Hirst won the Turner Prize. The work is expected to make between £500,000 and £700,000. Jenny Saville’s monumental portrait of the transgender photographer Del LaGrace Volcano, Matrix (1999), is estimated to sell for £800,000 to £1.2m.
The works are all being auctioned in London at Christie’s post-war and contemporary evening sale on 30 June.
“I made my money gambling. And here, at this auction, I’m gambling again. My gamble isn’t that you will pay enough for these works to justify my selling. My wager is that the future, for me and my museum, is more rewarding than the past,” Walsh says in a statement.