Bowie / Collector #9

Achille & Castiglioni

Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni
Brionvega RR 126 Stereo Cabinet, 1965
£800-1,200

It perhaps comes as no surprise to discover that the most innovative and daring musician of his generation listened to music on such an unconventional record player. Created by brothers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni for Brionvega, this playful stereo cabinet is a definitive piece of 1960s Italian design, with examples in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York and the V&A in London.

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Photograph from Sotheby's Hong Kong.

Bowie / Collector #7

Romuald Hazoumé
Alexandria, 1995
Found material and vinyl construction
£5,000-£7,000

Hazoumé

Beninese artist Romuald Hazoumé is probably best known for his sculptural assemblages of commonplace found objects, such as Alexandria. Much like Marcel Duchamp and his ‘Readymades’, Hazoumé appropriates familiar objects and reconfigures them, creating a dialogue between art history and the history of colonialism in Africa, as well as contemporary African politics, especially those surrounding oil.

Alexandria is indicative of Bowie’s far-reaching collecting interests, as well as his love of works with multiple layers of meaning and a sense of mischief and play. Bowie’s approach to contemporary African art – as with all other elements of the collection – was marked by a deep intellectual rigour, exemplified by his five-page review of the inaugural Johannesburg Biennale for Modern Painters in 1995.

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Photograph from Sotheby's Hong Kong.

Bowie / Collector #6

Hirst

Bursting with a magnificently dynamic energy in its pulsating kaleidoscope of reds, greens, blues and yellows, this is a vibrant and powerful example of Damien Hirst’s trademark ‘spin’ paintings. Hirst was one of only a handful of high-profile contemporary artists for whom Bowie publicly expressed his admiration, interviewing the ‘Young British Artist’ for Modern Painters in 1995. “He’s different. I think his work is extremely emotional, subjective, very tied up with his own personal fears – his fear of death is very strong – and I find his pieces moving and not at all flippant”, said Bowie in an interview with the New York Times.

Damien Hirst
Beautiful, Shattering, Slashing, Violent,
Pinky, Hacking Sphincter Painting, 1995
Gloss household paint on canvas
£250,000-350,000

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Bowie / Collector #5

Basquiat

“I feel the very moment of his brush or crayon touching the canvas. There is a burning immediacy to his ever evaporating decisions that fires the imagination ten or fifteen years on, as freshly molten as the day they were poured onto the canvas” – David Bowie on Basquiat, Modern Painters, 1996.

The Bowie-Basquiat connection is best known through the lens of Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film Basquiat, in which David played the role of the young artist’s mentor and collaborator, Andy Warhol. Air Power was acquired by Bowie the following year.

Jean-Michel Basquiat
Air Power, 1984
Acrylic and oilstick on canvas
£2.5-3.5m

“It comes as no surprise to learn that he [Basquiat] had a not-so-hidden ambition to be a rock musician, as his work relates to rock in ways that very few other visual artists get near.” – David Bowie on Basquiat, Modern Painters, 1996.

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Photograph from Sotheby's Hong Kong

Bowie / Collector #4

Lanyon

Peter Lanyon
Witness, 1961
Oil on canvas
£250,000-350,000

Witness is one of three works by Peter Lanyon that Bowie loaned to the artist’s retrospective at Tate St Ives in 2010. Lanyon painted Witness two years after he had first taken to the skies in a glider. This new activity allowed him to see the Cornish landscape from a radically different perspective and to bring bigger, more elemental forces into his painting, becoming “like the mountaineer who cannot see the clouds without feeling the lift inside them.” This is a painting of American scale and ambition, painted in a converted sail-loft in a small fishing town on the western-most tip of England.

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Photograph from Sotheby's Hong Kong