In a Market Lacking Overall Confidence, Christie’s London Puts Together a Solid $79.6 Million Contemporary Sale

Christie’s brought up the rear of London’s Frieze week auctions
this evening with a lengthy, two-and-a-half hour evening sale of 47
lots of Post-war and contemporary art estimated at £52.6 million to
£74.1 million ($64.9 million to $91.4 million), immediately
followed by 31 lots of Modern and contemporary Italian art
estimated at £18.5 million to £27.3 million ($22.8 million to $33.7
million).

The pre-sale estimates reflected the problems Christie’s had
with consignments this year: Combined estimates for Post-war and
Italian evening sales were down 46 percent from October 2018. The
Italian consignments were worst hit, with the estimated value of
that sale down by 61 percent.

Remember: this is the value of the total consignments, not of
individual works of art, so is an overall confidence issue.

Attending the sales, though, you would think such concerns did
not exist. The Post-war sale realized £64.5 million ($79.6
million), comfortably within estimate, and achieved eight
world-record prices for artists, with only six lots unsold; the
Italian sale realized £24.6 million ($30.4 million), again within
estimate with only two lots unsold.

The evening began with classic Minimalism from the collection of
Belgian couple Roger Matthys and Hilda Colle, bought in the early
1970s when the works were fresh out of studios. Like a lot of
European collectors, this couple bought American—Robert Mangold,
Carl Andre, Dan Flavin. The choice piece in the auction was a
vintage, six-and-a-half foot square copper and steel floor
sculpture from 1969 that sold above estimate for a record £2.4
million ($2.97 million) to a US phone bidder.

This group was followed by a rare appearance at auction by the
British Minimalist Bob Law, who burned himself out on alcohol and
was not really rediscovered until after his death in 2004. A
five-foot square, meditative pink-shaded monochrome from 1974
(somewhat misleadingly titled Watercolour V, when gesso is
the actual medium) carried the highest estimate yet for the artst
at £30,000 to £60,000 ($37,000 to $74,000). It sold for a
record £81,250 ($100,200) to a German phone bidder, signaling
that the market is beginning to catch on to this undervalued
artist.

The other historical rediscovery of the sale was the German
artist Thomas Bayrle, now in his 80s, whose work, though celebrated
at the New Museum in New York last year, has hardly ever been
auctioned either in London or New York. Two years ago, his original
Pop-art-meets-computer-technology work from the ’60s and ’70s
suddenly leapt into six figures in Amsterdam, and Christie’s had
another example sent to raise funds for the Museum Haus Konstruktiv
Zurich. Cup Woman (Milk Coffee) (1967) consists of
hundreds of tiny colored cups that make up a pixelated
head-and-shoulders image of a woman. Carrying the highest estimate
yet for Bayrle at £80,000 to £100,000 ($99,000 to
$123,000), it sold to a Christie’s Cologne representative on
the phone for a record £237,500 ($293,000).

The financial meat of this sale, though, revolved around three
long-time market front-runners—though few, tellingly, made their
estimated prices. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Four Big from
1982 was picked up by Acquavella Galleries for just under the
estimate at £8.6 million ($10.6 million). A pale polka dotted ’60s
painting of flowers by Sigmar Polke sold below estimate for £5.6
million ($6.9 million), and a large abstract picture by Gerhard
Richter from the collection of the Unicredit Group, which is
raising money to support social-impact banking, also went below
estimate at £7 million ($8.6 million).

For a moment, things looked a little glum for the Richter market
when a photo painting of a meadow also sold below estimate at £3.4
million ($4.2 million). But two other Richter paintings did manage
to exceed estimates: a small abstract on paper from the Unicredit
group sold to British art advisor Hugo Nathan for £1.1 million
($1.4 million), and US dealer Anthony Grant outgunned another
ex-Sotheby’s staffer, Gaby Palmieri, to buy a blue photo painting
of a bride and groom for £3.1 million ($3.8 million). Like the
sale as a whole, a healthy balance eventually prevailed.

As usual in these sales, evidence of upward price movements was
apparent. The sellers of a swirling action painting by Gutai group
artist Kazuo Shiraga were looking for a three-fold increase on the
work’s last auction price (€625,000 in Paris 10 years ago, or
$686,200) and more than realized their ambitions when
a telephone bidder sawed off competition from Aquavella
Galleries to buy it for £2.5 million ($3.8 million).

A work by France’s most expensive living artist, Pierre
Soulages, also demonstrated the healthy long-term prospects of his
market. A buyer, now dead, bought a 1987 work by the artist
for €50,000 ($54,900) in 1996; his heirs tonight saw that
price increase to £2.8 million ($3.5 million). The top
Soulages of the sale, a moody black and red abstract picture from
1960, saw competition between Belgium’s Vedovi Gallery and an Asian
phone bidder before it sold at a mid-estimate £5.5 million ($6.8
million).

The real action of the sale came in the middle, when works
by up-and-coming artists such as Tschabalala Self,
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and the self-taught outsider artist, Thornton
Dial (who died in 2016) saw record estimates.

In a real purple patch for the auctioneer, Self’s
Sapphire doubled its estimate to sell to a middle-aged
couple in the room for a record £395,000 ($487,000). Quinn’s
collage, Hosie Lady, didn’t quit hit the price he made at
Phillips on Wednesday, but sold above estimate for £125,000
($154,000) to a Christie’s client advisor in Asia, Wei-Ting
Jud.

Meanwhile, Dial’s dense relief of barbie tolls and plastic toys,
Trophies (Doll Factory) from 2000, which was
being sold by the actress Jane Fonda (and was estimated at
£160,000, or $197,300), sold for a record £225,000 ($278,000). (As
the title suggests, it is a work about the exploitation of women.
Fonda liked it because it reminded her of the female-empowering
role she played in the film Barbarella.) Dial’s previous
record was $106,250, set last November.

Wei-Ting was back in action buying Lady in Green, a
graphic painting by Pace Gallery’s much-in-demand artist Loie
Hollowell, for  £359,250 ($443,000)—doubling the record for
the artist, set in New York in March. Christie’s said later that 37
percent of their bidders this evening were from Asia.

Also looking for a new high was British potter Grayson Perry.
Diane and Marc Grainer, the American ceramics collectors, were
selling a pair of three-foot pots called The Guardians
(1998), which Perry describes as “the most literally
autobiographical work I made at a time of personal psychological
crisis,” six years after his daughter was born and as his
cross-dressing female alter ego, Claire, was beginning to hatch.
However, the pair was snapped up below estimate for £443,250
($547,000), making it only the second top price for the artist. The
buyer was the Soviet ceramics and photography collector, Alex
Lachmann.

The unexpected flop of the evening—and there weren’t too many of
those—was a work by the 50-year-old photo Surrealist Tomoo Gokita.
After a low-profile start at the auctions in Hong Kong 10 years
ago, the Japanese artist’s prices have crept up to a quadruple
estimate $1.1 million at Phillips New York in May.

At Christie’s this evening, Los Lobos (2018), an
impressive eight-and-a-half foot painting of a muscular Mexican
wrestling duo, painted in black and white, carried the artist’s
highest yet estimate of £350,000 to £450,000 ($432,000 to
$555,000), but no one took the bait and it failed to sell.

The post In a Market Lacking Overall Confidence, Christie’s
London Puts Together a Solid $79.6 Million Contemporary Sale
appeared first on artnet News.