Painting of Toronto rainbow tunnel expected to fetch millions at auction

Painting of Toronto rainbow tunnel expected to fetch millions at auction, It is a site that has been seen and loved by millions of commuters in the Greater Toronto Area for decades. Now, an oil painting of it is poised to sell in England for millions of pounds.

The site is the famous rainbow tunnel near the eastern perimeter of the northbound Don Valley Parkway. The colourful flight of urban fancy has been there since 1972, painted by a 16-year-old self-described “caretaker of dreams” from Norway, Berg Johnson. He did it as a sort of guerrilla-action memorial to a friend named Sigrid who died in a crash on the Parkway a year earlier. “I thought [the tunnel] looked like a smile when you look at it from above,” he told a Toronto newspaper in 2012

It is Sotheby’s auction house in London that likely will be grinning most beamishly on the evening of June 30. That’s when it’s putting up for the bidding Country-rock (wing-mirror), a large representation of the culvert done in 1999 by international art superstar Peter Doig. No official estimate range has been published for the 195-cm-by-270-cm urban pastoral, consigned by an unnamed collector who has held it since its creation. But according to one source, “It’s in the region of £9-million” – about $16.6-million (Cdn).

Mr. Doig has painted three vistas on canvas of the DVP rainbow from a highway perspective. But this is the only version to include a portion of the car providing that viewpoint in the picture frame and the first to be sold at auction. The first vista, painted in 1998-99 and housed in Copenhagen’s Ole Faarup Collection, was the cover image for the catalogue of Tate Britain’s famous 2008 Doig retrospective. The other, called Country Rock Version 2001-02, is in the collection of the Victor Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev.