LONDON.- An extremely rare Banksy screenprint never released publicly and not seen on the market before will be offered as part of a Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions sale of Modern and Contemporary Prints. The sale is on Wednesday 11th December. Created in 2012, ‘Love Hurts’ is signed by the artist and is one of only 16 copies of the screenprint, making it one of the rarest of Banksy's works.

The image will be immediately familiar to those who followed Banksy's October residency in New York, where a heart similar to the one in the present lot was painted on a wall in Brooklyn on 7th October. This work by the elusive British street artist is estimated to sell for £50,000 – 70,000. [Lot 129]

It is highly unusual to see hand coloured etchings by Picasso. In general they were produced for only his closest friends and collaborators. The present work created by the artist in 1934, is a extensively hand-worked presentation copy, given to the printer Roger Lacourier in thanks for the work he had done producing ‘The Vollard Suite’, Picasso’s masterpiece set of etchings. Never before seen on the market, the present lot presents a unique opportunity to acquire an early, hand-coloured etching by one of the most important artists of the 20th Century. It is estimated at £30,000 - 50,000. [Lot 89]

‘La Geurre des Trous’ (the War of Holes) by Futurist/Vorticist artist Christopher Nevinson (b. 1889 –1946) depicts a soldier's anticipation, presumably in a moment before he exits the trench. A member of the Friends' Ambulance Unit during WWI, Nevinson was deeply affected by his experience caring for injured French troops which preoccupied much of his early work and produced a remarkable series of works, leading to his appointment as an official War Artist for the British Government.

The drawing shares a similar construction to another Nevinson pen and ink drawing ‘La Mitrailleuse’, which was also recently sold at auction. Both drawings were preliminary studies for two of his most important oils of the period. La Guerre de Trous and La Mitraileuse were drawn in 1914/15 and looking at specific elements within both works, it seems possible the works share the same location, albeit from different perspectives. Nevinson was stationed in Woesten, just North-West of Ypres for two and a half months from November 1914, and this location served as the source material for his earliest war images. La Geurre de Trous is arguably the finest work on paper by the artist to have appeared at auction in a generation It is estimated at £80,000-120,000. [Lot 13]

Based on 'love' and 'girls' in comic books, ‘Two Nudes’ is an integral part of the last great series of works produced by Roy Lichtenstein. ‘The Nudes’ series, begun in the spring of 1993, are some of the largest the artist ever produced. Completed in December that year, the works reflect the artist's fascination of the interplay between the two-dimensionality of the drawn image, and the three-dimensional effect created by the application of variably sized ben-day dots.

In ‘Two Nudes’ the effect is particularly successful, giving a genuine sense of depth in the image. In an interview in 1997 with David Sylvester Lichtenstein said: " It's a little bit the way chiaroscuro isn't just shadows but a way of combining the figure and the background, or whatever is near it in a dark area… You're not confined to the object pattern, but the subject matter excuse for this is that it's a shadow, and that's interesting to me." The screenprint is estimated at £100,000-150,000 [Lot 250]

A rare collection of work by Richard Hamilton and Dieter Roth which have for the most part never appeared at auction, will be included in the December 11th sale. The artists spent three weeks in July 1976 working closely together at Hamilton’s home and studio in Cadaqués on the Costa Brava, the same town that Salvador Dalí stated influenced much of his work. The resulting works, both collaborative and independent, are some of the most highly regarded yet little seen works in both Hamilton and Roth’s oeuvre. These works form the core of a magnificently rare collection of works by both artists.

Over the course of his career, Hamilton always carried a small Polaroid camera and on meeting other artists, he would ask them to take a photograph of him with it. The resulting images were largely unseen during his lifetime. In 2009 Hamilton decided to digitally re-work them, presenting them as a single body of work, with each image sold individually. With only two impressions of each image in existence (one was reserved exclusively for the artist's archive), these are some of the rarest of Hamilton's printmaking, and this is the first occasion that any of them have appeared at auction.

Perhaps the rarest of is a magnificent hand coloured self-portrait Polaroid by Hamilton. Originally intended as an edition of 50, it is known that less than a tenth were actually made. Also included is a collection of 12 of the re-worked digital Polaroid portraits of Hamilton, produced specially for his show at the Serpentine Gallery in 2010. They are estimated at £8,000-10,000 and £50,000-70,000 respectively. [Lots 179 and 181]