NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s announced the sale of The Sender Collection, a pioneering assemblage of Contemporary Art that brings together many of the most influential artists of the past several decades. Noted for its breadth and scope – nearly 400 works by 139 different artists – the collection will be presented over the course of the next 18 months in both London and New York and is estimated to bring in excess of $70 million. Approximately 100 lots will be offered in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening and Day Auctions on 14 & 15 May 2014 in New York, led by some of the finest examples of the work of Dan Flavin, Keith Haring, Rosemarie Trockel, and Sarah Lucas to appear on the market. Highlights will shown in Los Angeles and London prior to the opening of the exhibition in New York on 2 May.

Alexander Rotter, Co-Head of Contemporary Art worldwide, and Gabriela Palmieri, Senior Specialist, Contemporary Art, said, “This is the art of our generation. With a brilliant and prescient vision, Adam Sender built a collection that is both visually exciting and intellectually challenging. It’s an honor to present such a spectacular range of work by these groundbreaking artists and we look forward to exploring and celebrating the collection over the next 18 months.

“While examining a number of artists in depth, the collection is also united by a number of fascinating threads that reach across artist, decade and medium – Conceptual art, Photography, Female artists, Neon, African-American artists, and more. Through intense engagement and focus, The Sender Collection zeroed in on many artists long before they received the recognition that made them sought-after in the market, as well as discovered bodies of work by key artists that had yet to be appreciated – he was truly ahead of the curve.”

The 14 May 2014 Contemporary Art Evening Sale will feature a series of pieces that are among the pinnacles of their artist’s outputs. Highlights include Untitled #93 from Cindy Sherman’s acclaimed Centerfolds series, which entered the Sender Collection in 1998 (est. $2/3 million). The series is widely recognized as the body of work that catapulted Sherman to a new level of critical and commercial success and is now represented in many major museum collections. Untitled (Cowboy) from 2000 by Richard Price is a dramatic and large-scale example from the definitive Cowboy series in which the artist appropriated and cropped images from advertisements for Marlboro cigarettes (acquired in 2001, est. $1/1.5 million). Martin Kippenberger’s Untitled from 1981 comes from the iconic and highly-celebrated corpus Lieber Maler, Male Mir (Dear Painter, Paint for Me) in which Kippenberger employed a painter of filmposters, known as Werner, to execute this work based on the artist’s own ideas and specifications (acquired in 2003, est. $3/4 million). John Baldessari’s Commissioned Painting: A Painting by Edgar Transue is one of the artist’s Commissioned Paintings in which artists were hired to paint hands pointing at various objects (acquired in 2001, est. $2/3 million).

“When I bought my first work over 15 years ago, I never could have envisioned the adventure I was embarking on – the passion, and at times obsession, I would come to have for collecting,” commented Mr. Sender. “Growing up in the 1980s, I began with artists of that generation and used those works to look back at the artists that had influenced them, and eventually looked forward to more recent Contemporary art. I sought works I loved visually, but also artists that had a unique language. As the collection grew, I found enormous pleasure in sharing it with the public, through loans and exhibitions, and while the time has come to move on to the next chapter of my life, I’m happy to also be working with a number of institutions on significant gifts, in addition to be planning the series of auctions with Sotheby’s.”