Here are a few more sales from ArtBasel recorded by Carol Vogel and published late last week:
Barbara Kruger’s “Are We Having Fun Yet,” a 1987 photographic silk-screen of a woman’s hands covering her face was, until recently, hanging in the Dallas Museum of Art, where it had been on loan since 1988. Sandy Heller, a Manhattan art adviser who works with hedge-fund billionaires, bought it for $700,000 from the Skarstedt Gallery of New York within hours of the fair’s opening. He declined to say for whom he had purchased it.
Bigger sales were reported too. At Jan Krugier, a gallery in Geneva and New York, Picasso’s “Personnage,” a 1960 plaster sculpture, sold to an unidentified collector for $15 million. Hauser & Wirth, dealers with spaces in Zurich, London and New York, sold a set of five dwarf sculptures from Paul McCarthy’s “White Snow” series, to a European collector for $3 million.
Pieces by Louise Bourgeois, who died last month, were hot commodities. At Xavier Hufkens, a Brussels dealer, a 2009 mixed-media work on paper, “A Baudelaire (#7),” priced at more than $650,000, was snapped up. Michael Werner Gallery of New York sold two works by Sigmar Polke, the German artist who died last week. His “Here and Elsewhere,” a 1975-76 photo collage that was priced at $450,000, was bought by an American collector, and a multilayered abstract painting with an asking price of around $1.5 million was purchased by a European foundation, said Gordon Veneklasen, a partner in the gallery.
Inside Art: The Buzz in Basel (New York Times)
