World’s most expensive Egg coming to Auction – Jeff Koon’s ‘Cracked Egg`

Jeff Koon’s ‘Cracked Egg` (Magenta), one of the acclaimed artist’s five unique Cracked Egg sculptures ( the others are yellow, blue, violet and red) will be up for auction at London’s famous auction house, Christie’s, on the 13th of February 2014. It has been available for viewing since the 8th of this month and is expected to raise between £10 million and £15 million.

Hailed as Koon’s most significant work, the egg stands at a height of almost two metres. Crafted from hyper-reflective steel, the sculpture’s mesmerising polished exterior and glistening mirror interior combine with its huge scale to conjure up a sense of wonder in viewers.

Appearing delicately, almost impossibly thin, the sculpture’s convex contour has a pureness of line and saw-tooth, cartoon-like edges that render it playful, yet perfect in every detail. The translucent magenta coating’s saturation is set-off to perfection against the brilliantly silver interior.

According to Jeff Koon, the egg, a culmination of many years of laborious research and development, is a celebration and exploration of the ‘here and now’ and the eternal; the ephemeral and the physical; the asymmetrical and the symmetrical; a dialogue with nature and a sense of fertility, growth and forward movement.

This precision-engineered example of Koon’s work, a feat in technical virtuosity, is not the first of his sculptures to be sold at auction. In 2008, his ‘Balloon Flower (Magenta) sold at £12.9 million, while his Balloon Dog (Orange) was sold at a staggering $58.4 million (just under £35.3 million) in 2013 (Christie’s New York).