Peter Doig's San Juan painting realises $7.2m at Christie's London

Peter Doig's The Heart of Old San Juan sold for £4.5m ($7.2m) in Christie's Post War and Contemporary Art auction in London on October 16.

The painting dates to 1999 and was executed in Puerto Rico just before he moved from London to the Caribbean.

Peter Doig 1999
Peter Doig painted the present work in Puerto Rico

This marked a major shift in his subject matter, from the snowbound Canadian landscapes of his childhood to the tropical heat of Trinidad.

Doig's auction record stands at $11.9m set for a work titled Road House earlier this year. As one of the finest painters of his generation, his work is likely to increase significantly in value over the coming years.

Gerhard Richter's Waldstuck (Chile) (Forest Piece (Chile)) made £4.4m ($7m).

Richter Wald
Richter's Waldstuck series focuses on forests from around the world

The lot is one of three large paintings of the Chilean rainforest from the artist's Waldstuck series (1969).

He explained in his book Landscapes: "my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestions of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful' (even if I did not always find a way of showing it); and by untruthful I mean glorifying the way we look at Nature - Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless; the total antithesis of ourselves, absolutely inhuman."

Richter's auction record stands at $37.1m, set for Domplatz, Mailand in May last year.

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