Gropius, who from 1919 to 1928 directed the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, designed the house in 1921-22 for lawyer Fritz Otte. The property is considered a dramatic evolution of Gropius's earlier seminal Haus Sommerfeld, which was also located in Berlin, but destroyed in World War II. The Bauhaus founder embraced a forward-looking approach with an unadorned, sharp-edged structure that rejected the heaviness of 19th-century historicism.
The two works offered at the house's 20th/21st Century Evening Sale in London on March 5 include Schober (Haybarn) from 1984, one of the artist's largest landscape photo-paintings, with presale expectations in the region of £6 million ($8.2 million). Formerly in in the collection of New York real estate developers Emily and Jerry Spiegel, who acquired the work from dealer Marian Goodman in 1985, the canvas sold at Christie's New York in 2017 for $6.97 million to the current owner.
Presented by the Luma Foundation in Engadin, Switzerland, as part of Elevation 1049, STRIP TOWER (962) brings Gerhard Richter's long-running investigations into the Alpine landscape, extending his practice beyond the canvas and into three-dimensional space. On view until the spring of 2029, the work draws from the methodology of his Strip Paintings, where a single painted gesture is subjected to successive acts of photographing, scanning, digital slicing, and stretching.