Up to $10m expected from auction of art by McCahon, Hammond, Parekōwhai and more

Gordon Walters as you've never seen him paint before and a four-tonne sculpture of a bull are among the highlights of an upcoming record-breaking art auction, reports Kim Knight.

Got a spare $2.4million? It could buy you a Colin McCahon painting - and a new art world record.

The most expensive work by the artist to ever hit an Auckland auction room goes under the hammer next month.

Previously owned by collector and philanthropist Adrian Burr and his partner Peter Tatham, it's one of about 250 lots in an upcoming estate sale being organised by Art+Object.

With a total sales estimate of between $8m and $10m, the collection is on track to smash the previous record for the country's richest art auction - the Tim and Sherrah Francis collection, which came in at $7.2m in 2016.

Peter Tatham and Adrian Burr at the latter's 70th birthday. Photo/Supplied

Auctioneer Ben Plumbly says although Burr and Tatham were public in their arts philanthropy, as collectors they were "incredibly private". The couple were founding benefactors of the ASB Waterfront Theatre, Venice Biennale patrons and recently had their support of The Arts Foundation recognised with a Laureate Award in their names. They kept their personal collection behind relatively closed doors in Auckland's Herne Bay and in Hawke's Bay.

"They're buying these masterpieces of New Zealand art and housing them and a lot of people haven't seen them . . . it's a real uncovering of museum-quality paintings . . . this is a very private, private collection."

Detail from a major 1979 Colin McCahon work St Matthew: Lightning that could fetch up to $2.4m at auction. Photo/Supplied

Plumbly says the catalogue is also unique in that the pair frequently "back-filled", buying significant works many years after they were made. The upcoming auction (on October 14 and 16) will actually include two McCahons - one from 1946 and the other "one of the four or five last large great canvases he did" from 1979.

"[Burr and Tatham] had the benefit of hindsight, and that came from their incredibly successful careers as business people."

Plumbly says whereas other recent major art collection auctions have been centred on lifetimes of purchases made relatively cheaply and "in the moment" before artists became big names, Burr and Tatham were able to pay significant money for both missing links and major contemporary works.

Detail from the Bill Hammond painting that is expected to make up to $600,000 at auction.

"There's an amazing Bill Hammond work, which we anticipate will set a new record price for Hammond paintings at auction," says Plumbly. "It's from 1995 but they bought it in the early 2000s. That's what makes the collection so special - they were looking at it as an entire, organic entity; they're looking for absences and holes and they're not scared to identify those and go back and fill them."

One "fabulous" example of that was a 1950s painting by Gordon Walters. Best known for his koru designs, the small nude was purchased from the artist's estate.

"I've never seen it exhibited and was not aware of Walters producing anything like it," Plumbly said.

Painted in 1950, Pallas is an unusual nude from artist Gordon Walters. It will be auctioned at Art + Object in October.

The auction's biggest ticket items include Hammond's Living Large No. 7 (estimated at $400,000-$600,000 or around $100,000 more than the previous high for the artist who died last year) and McCahon's St Matthew: Lightning. The latter has an estimated value of $1.6m-$2.4m and, if it sells in that vicinity, would set a new record for a McCahon at auction. The previous highest realised price was just over $1.6m, set in 2016.

Meanwhile, a four-tonne cast bronze and stainless steel sculpture of a bull sitting on top of a piano is expected to fetch at least $900,000, or three times the current auction price record for any living New Zealand artist. Part of Michael Parekōwhai's 2011 Venice Biennale exhibition, the bull is currently resident in a Herne Bay garden where it had to be installed by crane.

Michael Parekōwhai's sculpture A Peak in Darien was first displayed at the Venice Biennale. Photo/Supplied

The work is a companion piece to the Parekōwhai bull installed at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. Purchased via a major fundraising effort, it is often cited as a symbol of the city's post-earthquake resilience.

"It would certainly be lovely to reunite the two," says Plumbly. "But one of the things we've noticed in recent years is that the acquiring and purchasing ability of institutions, what they turn up for at auction, it's almost vanished. We hardly ever see the institutions buying art at auction anymore, because they're just not in a position to. They've lost their funding and they're shifting from this public model to a private, philanthropic model."

The loss of major arts benefactors like Burr and Tatham was significant, Plumbly said.

"Adrian and Peter had an archival storage facility and they regularly rotated their collection. That type of collection is exceedingly rare now . . . we're in a generation where people are looking to art more to decorate their homes, than to collect en masse and to highly engage with it in the way these collectors were in the past."

Inside an art collection - the Burr Tatham home featuring artworks by Ann Verdourt, Tony Fomison, Bill Hammond and Don Binney. Photo/Supplied

Plumbly says "there's no denying the art market is exceedingly buoyant right now", pointing to a recent auction where a Fiona Pardington work that was part of the recent Auckland Art Gallery exhibition Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art sold for $50,000 more than its top estimate.

"In saying that, in all honesty I don't see that buoyancy playing out at the top end of the market. I don't think the market for works in the several hundreds of thousands of dollars has changed as much as it has for contemporary works in the vicinity of less than $50k - that seems to be where the heat is, currently."