Provenance: Private Collection, Europe. Provenance: Post-War & Contemporary Afternoon Session, Christie's, New York, 16. May 2013, lot. no. 623. Provenance: Private collection, Denmark.

With the impressive work “Bhasat Wilap at Assi Ghat”, the English contemporary artist Marc Quinn is the painter behind one of the auction's highlights. Bharat Milap is amongst the most popular festivals in Varanasi, the holiest city of Hinduism, where one celebrates the victory of truth over evil. Varanasi is situated at the Ganges, and along the banks of the river you find stone stairs – or Ghaters – leading down to the water, which is the goal of the religious pilgrimages to the area. Thousands of people participate in large processions, where white-clothed figures wearing red and orange turbans resemble a flowing sea of flowers.

The artist explains his thoughts behind the flower paintings on his website: “This series of flower paintings subverts one of the oldest forms of picture making: the still-life. To create these hyper-realist oil paintings, Quinn creates a still-life arrangement in his studio using flowers and fruit bought in London on a particular day. Since most of the flowers and fruit in these compositions would never bloom at the same time, or even be found together in the natural world, they show us the way in which human desire has created new seasons - bringing together in one geographical location things that nature would not assemble. Quinn photographs the arrangements, which are sometimes set amid a snowy ground or volcanic sand, and then makes oil paintings based on the photographs. The paintings depict a frozen moment of ”unnatural" time. Often large in scale and dramatically coloured, their beauty belies a sinister subtext: the relentless human desire to control nature. Titled after freaks of ecology the works offer up a corrupt beauty that suggests our possible future.”