Scott Reyburn reports on the final London Contemporary art sale on Friday at Phillips de Pury on Bloomberg. The Russian-owned auction house pulled in £6.1m ($9.6m) with 37 of the 43 lots on offer sold:

“The market is better than I expected,” the London-based collector Amir Shariat, chief executive of Auctor Capital Partners Ltd., said in an interview. “It’s clearly part of the general mood, though demand is geared to strong names and good works.”

[A Judd] 1987 two-tier minimalist wall sculpture “Untitled (87-29 Studer),” fetched a top price of 735,650 pounds with fees.

Basquiat’s “Untitled,” a collage incorporating a skull, and a dark landscape in oils by the artist titled “Cash Crop,” both dating from 1984, sold for 713,250 pounds each.

Shariat was an underbidder on a 1989 Gerhard Richter abstract that sold for an above-estimate 634,850 pounds.

The Master, Judd Tully, records the more esoteric artist records:

Five pieces set new artist records, including Gregor Hildebrandt’s cassette tape on canvas triptych, Faith, 2001 (est. £25-35,000), which sold to a telephone bidder for £49,250 ($77,168), and Leandro Erlich’s Rain, 1999 (est. £30-40,000), a stormy sound-and-light installation with a sliding glass window and steel frame that sold to another telephone bidder for £32,450 ($50,844). […]

The one brief touch of excitement in the room was when a bidder in the room nabbed Piero Manzoni’s Achrome, circa 1962, a nifty little package of mixed media on canvas with newspaper, wax, sealing rope, and lead (est. £120-180,000) for a bargain £121,250 ($189,485).

Basquiat Works Snapped Up at $9.6 Million Phillips London Sale (Bloomberg)
Sparsely Attended Phillips Sale Scores with Judd (ArtInfo.com)