With a Middling $27 Million Sale That Barely Hit Its Low Estimate, Phillips Closes London’s Contemporary Art Auction Week

Phillips rounded out London’s winter contemporary art evening
sales on Thursday night with a passable £20.7 million ($27 million)
auction that barely scraped its low estimate of £18.2 million
($23.7 million). (As always, final prices include the buyer’s
premium; presale estimates do not.)

Although the event was reasonably well attended, the sale total
(which had a high estimate of £25.5 million, or $33.3
million) was down a considerable 43 percent from last year,
even though it reached a higher total than in previous winter sales
in 2015 and 2017.

Of the 41 lots in the catalogue, four were unsold by the end of
the night and three were withdrawn before the sale even began.

Notable in both categories was the artist known as KAWS, whose
prices have rapidly escalated as of late on the back of Asian
demand. But the extraordinary KAWS market appears to have been
reined in for the moment, and not before time, some might say.

On Tuesday night at Sotheby’s, one guaranteed KAWS
sculpture failed to produce any upside for the
guarantor. Then, at Phillips on Thursday, another
sculpture, titled Final Days, was withdrawn (it was
estimated at £700,000–£900,000, or $913,042–$117,391); a
painting titled On Time (estimated at
£300,000–£400,000, or $391,303–$521,738) failed to sell; and
another picture, the blissful FAR AWAY FRIENDS,
sold on only a single bid—and for only £900,000 ($117,391),
below its estimate.

Phillips had secured third-party guarantors for most of its
top-selling lots, but the majority of those big-ticket items
appeared to sell to those backers—and without much
competition. These might include Ed Ruscha’s awesome landscape
God Knows Where (estimated at £3.4 million, or
$4.4 million); a 1981 Keith Haring painted tarpaulin (£3.2
million, or $4.2 million); and a Damien Hirst medicine cabinet,
Bodies, from 1989 (£1.4 million, or $1.8 million).

The cabinet came from the collection of financial trader Robert
Tibbles, who bought it from the
artist’s degree show in 1989 for £600. Tonight, it set a record
for a Hirst medicine cabinet when it sold for £1.4 million ($1.8
million), even though there was no other bidding. Such was the
situation for Phillips, which had to compete with Sotheby’s and
Christie’s for the £4 million Tibbles collection, and had to
quote higher than they may have preferred.

Also from the Tibbles collection was an early Hirst spot
painting, Antipyrylazo III, which enjoyed slightly more
competition, selling within estimate for £1.3 million ($1.7
million). But that was still several bids short of the top
prices for the artist’s spot paintings, which were set in the
heyday of the Hirst market in 2007–08.

The remainder of the Tibbles collection, which is focused on YBA
art, included mid-estimate prices for early Hirst spin and
butterfly paintings and a large picture by YBA guru Michael
Craig-Martin (now represented by Gagosian). The painting, titled
Full, sold above estimate for £162,500
($211,956)—just short of the £175,000 record set for a work
by Craig-Martin in the George Michael collection sale at
Christie’s last year. Full is probably the better
painting, but then Tibbles isn’t George Michael.

Bringing up the rear of the Tibbles collection was Magnolia
Door One by Gary Hume, which was chased by London dealer
Offer Waterman before selling above estimate for £40,000 ($52,173).
A lone survivor from a series of door paintings by Hume on which
the gloss paint cracked beyond repair, it may turn out to have been
a bargain. Overall, the Tibbles collection was a test from which
the YBA market emerged satisfactorily, considering it has not yet
entered the realms of historic significance, and in light of the
fact that this kind of conceptually based art is not currently in
fashion.

What is in fashion was represented in the early lots of
the sale, and indeed the very first painting in the auction
was by Ghanaian-born artist Amoako Boafo. The Lemon
Bathing Suit, a large, colorful figurative painting by the
young artist, was reportedly consigned by the Los Angeles dealer
and collector Stefan Simchowitz, and it sold—stunningly—for a
benchmark £675,000 ($881,432) against a £30,000 to £50,000
estimate ($39,130 to $65,217).

That estimate was based on a sell-out display by Chicago dealer
Mariane Ibrahim at Art Basel Miami Beach, where paintings were
priced between $15,000 and $45,000. But clearly, speculative
elements in the market decided to send Boafo’s prices into
orbit.

The Boafo was swiftly followed by another hot young artist,
Julie Curtiss, whose Four Buns was chased by London
dealer Omer Tiroche before selling to an Asian phone bidder on the
high estimate for £137,500 ($179,347). Separately, a new record
of £435,000 was set for a work by Tschbalala Self for
her sewn fabric, human-haired, stiletto-heeled
Princess, from 2017.

A fashionable opening quartet of lots was completed by a large,
colorful abstract canvas, Neanderthal Jeans, by Eddie
Martinez, whose work has been selling well all week. The buyer this
time, at a top-estimate £375,000 ($489,129), was Russian art
specialist and dealer James Butterwick, who was also active for a
client at Sotheby’s on Tuesday.

Among the other dealers buying (and there weren’t many tonight)
were reps from the Levy Gorvy gallery, which snapped up a 1990
Gunther Forg work below estimate for £411,000 ($536,085). Forg’s
prices have been rising since his death in 2013, and this painting
had last sold at auction in 2006 for £66,000 ($86,086 in today’s
dollars).

The post With a Middling $27 Million Sale That Barely Hit
Its Low Estimate, Phillips Closes London’s Contemporary Art Auction
Week appeared first on artnet News.