Lindsay Pollock recaps the floor action in The Art Newspaper daily edition (all bullet points are direct quotes from Pollock):
- Prices at Frieze start at a few thousand pounds and climb into the hundreds of thousands. This year, there seemed to be a threshold at around $100,000. Higher sales were rare.
- “We didn’t expect a dead fair,” said dealer Iwan Wirth of Hauser & Wirth (C10), with branches in London, Zurich and New York. “But we didn’t expect it to be as lively as it is.” […] He used around 40% of his stand to showcase work by 70-year-old New York painter Ida Applebroog, who was hot in the 1980s but then faded from the limelight. He sold five of her works, including a haunting orange painting Monalisa, 2008, for $350,000—his highest priced sale by Friday afternoon.
- The fair attracted collectors who have only recently come into the market, taking advantage of lower prices and greater supply. “There was a general correction: asking prices are down 40% in some cases,” says hedge fund manager Thomas Sandell, who purchased works by Glenn Ligon and Barnaby Furnas on his first trip to Frieze.
- Greek businessman and collector Dimitris Daskalopoulos made one of the fair’s biggest buys, with a David Hammons’ 2009 installation from Salon 94 (B11), priced at $1.5m.
Spirits Lifting (The Art Newspaper)
