Help the Hungry: Stunning works from top artists up for grabs at campaign auction

Works by Ai Weiwei, Tracey Emin and Bridget Riley feature in Sotheby’s sale for food surplus charity The Felix Project

Monday 20 July 2020 18:26 EDT

Ai Weiwei – Small Plate with Flowers, 2014 (Ai Weiwei/Lisson Gallery)

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“We have only got each other.” What could be more true? At a time when Londoners from all walks of life are struggling due to the impact of coronavirus, the importance of love and care from others has been magnified tenfold.

The phrase comes from a work made by the artist Bob & Roberta Smith – one of several fantastic lots in an auction kicking off today at sothebys.com to support The Independent’s Help the Hungry appeal.

Over the past four months we have raised more than £7.5m for food redistribution charity The Felix Project – a cause for which we have pledged to raise £10m as well as to open central London’s largest community kitchen.

The auction is an opportunity to get your hands on works by some amazing artists – more likely to be seen on the walls of a museum than your living room. They can also be viewed at Sotheby’s, 34-35 New Bond Street.

For more details on the auction at Sotheby’s click here.

Ai Weiwei

Small Plate with Flowers, 2014

Ceramic has been a recurring motif for Ai Weiwei (a 1995 series of photographs showed him dropping a Han dynasty urn) and he has often used porcelain, for centuries a secret formula known only to Chinese makers. Flowers, too, are significant – when his passport was taken Ai put a bunch of fresh flowers in a bike basket outside his studio every day until he was able to travel freely. This small plate holds a great deal of meaning.

Estimate: £18,000-£22,000

Yinka Shonibare

Unstructured Icons: Aristocrat I, 2018

Yinka Shonibare deconstructions of icons of western power couldn’t be more current. This elegant woodcut print, using vivid Batik textiles, transposes animal masks from Mali onto the faces of English aristocratic figures enriched off the back of colonisation and slavery. The patterns of textiles overlay the repeating patterns of power and show how history’s long fingers reach into our present.

Estimate: £2,500-£3,500

Bob & Roberta Smith

We Have Only Got Each Other, 2019

Unfailingly optimistic, Bob & Roberta Smith’s work is always a call to care. He’s known for his colourful and impassioned but peaceful slogans (“Make Art Not War” seems like a good standard to live by) and his advocacy of art as a tool for education and understanding. We Have Only Got Each Other quotes his late mother, the artist Deirdre Borlase, spoken in response to the divisions revealed during the Brexit campaign — but its universal meaning is clear.

Estimate: £3,000-£5,000

Tracey Emin

Good tears, 2013

I’m a sucker for a good drawing – I’ve always felt that even at 500-odd years distance, it’s the form that brings you closest to an artist; the sweep of a human hand that has just left the page. After many years of deeply mining her own emotions and experiences in her work, Emin is an artist at the height of her powers. Her raw, almost agonisingly expressive draughtsmanship gets me every time and this little sketch nails the feeling of having a really good cry.

Estimate: £12,000-£18,000

Anish Kapoor

Omo, 2018; Untitled, 2015; Untitled, 2015

These three etchings – a supremely generous donation from Anish Kapoor, more usually known for the interactive theatricality of his large-scale sculptures – exude a quiet drama. Their simplicity belies their seductiveness; velvety and intense, they draw you in, never quite revealing their secrets.

Estimate: £5,000-£7,000

Mark Wallinger

Ghost, 2001

A chance to nab an otherwise sold-out edition (produced for Wallinger’s Whitechapel Gallery show in 2001): Wallinger’s screenprint was created by producing a black-and-white negative of George Stubbs’s painting Whistlejacket, with the addition of a narwhal’s horn, resulting in an image that reminds me of those 19th century fakery-photos of “fairies”. Wallinger was inspired by X-rays of Old Masters, which he thinks of as akin to spirit photography: “The revelation of the invisible, supernatural life of a painting.”

Estimate: £3,000-£5,000

Bridget Riley

Untitled (Elongated Triangles 2), 1971

A reminder of the pre-lockdown era, when we were able to wander the Hayward Gallery and bathe in the sea of pulsating colour that was Riley’s superb exhibition. This screenprint is from a series that vibrates right off the paper (Tate owns an edition of Elongated Triangles 5, so you’ll be in good company if you get your hands on this one).

Estimate: £4,000-£6,000

Michael Craig-Martin

Mies van der Rohe Chair, Saarinen Chair, 2019

The essence of things is what Michael Craig-Martin seeks in his work, and colour is part of seducing the viewer to really look at the objects that make up our world. These sculptural reliefs in polished steel come from a series that pays homage to designers and architects whose vision has shaped what we think of as “modern”. You can’t sit on them, but look at them. Aren’t they beautiful?

Estimate: £10,000-£15,000