A Return to Normalcy
The Master, Judd Tully, has some more temperature taking at Frieze:
The days of the five-minute decision are over,” said Andreas Gegner, director of Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers’s London branch. “The guideline for the future is that quality works at good prices will sell, and bad pieces won’t.”
Evidently the gallery, which also has a Cologne location and is opening a Berlin branch this weekend, had some good pieces. A new mural-sized manipulated photo work by Andreas Gursky — based on a space-agey music club in Frankfurt — sold for €600,000 ($806,000).
The gallery also sold a two-panel piece by John Baldessari, Beautiful in My Eyes from 2006, for $350,000; a large George Condo drawing in acrylic, charcoal, and oil pastel, Rodrigo with Girlfriend (2008), for $75,000; Thomas Demand’s Kabine, a C-print/Diasec image from 2007, from an edition of 6, for €130,000; Sterling Ruby’s funky, towering sculpture Monument Stalagmite-Wear It (2006), executed in urethane, Formica, and wood, for $135,000; and a fresh work from the Swiss duo Fischli Weiss, Untitled (Egg), in mixed media and plaster, for €450,000. [ . . . ]
Photography and sculpture were also moving at New York’s Metro Pictures. Several prints from a new series by self-portrait icon Cindy Sherman sold at $175,000 apiece. The artist continues to invent new personas, here appearing as a fashionable, middle-aged woman, dripping in Balenciaga and wearing oversized glasses. Her new show opens at the New York gallery next month.
“We came here with no expectations,” said the gallery’s Tom Heman, “and it’s been fine. The whole art world has gotten used to this totally hyperactive market, and now it has returned to a little bit of normalcy.”
