Scott Reyburn reports on Phillips de Pury’s BRIC sale that did well for the B, R & C artists. Indians didn’t do so well:

“Russia and China were strong,’’ Roger Tatley, senior director at the London-based Alison Jacques Gallery, said in an interview. “The Saatchi venue was very elegant. I’m sure it was a great benefit to have the auction hung like a museum show, though it was unusual to have everything bought on the telephone. That might have had something to do with the volcanic ash grounding planes.”

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• A painting by the Russian artist Erik Bulatov […] was the top lot in a 4.1 million-pound ($6.3 million) auction. […] The Non-Conformist artist’s Cyrillic word painting “ENTRANCE — NO ENTRANCE” fetched 713,250 pounds.

• A well-heeled Russian-speaker was also the underbidder when Komar & Melamid’s tongue-in-cheek 1972 canvas “Meeting Between Solzhenitsyn and Boell at Rostropovich’s Country House’’ sold for 657,250 pounds, more than four times the 150,000-pound upper estimate.

• Zhang Xiaogang’s 2006 painting “Amnesia and Memory” was the most expensive of the Chinese contemporary works at 385,250 pounds. This was valued at 220,000 pounds to 320,000 pounds.

• Lygia Clark‘s 1960 Neo-Concretist aluminum sculpture “Bicho” was one of just three Brazilian works in the evening sale. Competition from at least four telephone bidders generated a record price of 367,250 pounds, double the low estimate.

Russian Painting Tops $6.3 Million Sale of Emerging-Market Art (Bloomberg)[/private_subscriber][/private_bundle]