Bloomberg was more excited by celebrity sightings at Frieze, but even those were somewhat backward looking (Elle MacPherson and Joseph Fiennes,) than art sales:
“People are looking at works, thinking about them and buying them,” Robin Vousden, the London-based director of Gagosian, said after six works sold during the first two hours of Frieze.
- Stingel’s 2011 monochrome portrait of the Austrian artist Franz West, who curated the Gagosian booth, sold for a price of more than $500,000.
- Antwerp-based Zeno X Gallery: “Interior nr. I,” a 2010 painting by the Belgian Tuymans, was bought by a U.K. collector
Artinfo has a handful of sales from the first day at Frieze and Frame:
- Hauser & Wirth: three editions of “Earth Mask II” (2011) by Thomas Houseago, all sold to European collectors for $100,000 apiece. Houseago’s “Hermaphrodite” (2011) sold for $425,000,
- Bischoff/Weiss sold two Raphael Zarka videos, priced at £11,300 ($17,813) and £7,000 ($11,034), respectively, to David Walsh‘s Tazmanian Museum of Old and New Art
- Los Angeles’s François Ghebaly sold a sculpture by Patrick Jackson to hotel tycoon Andre Balazs for $9,000.
Big Sales Are Sparse at the Frieze Art Fair as Collectors Opt to Socialize and Window Shop (Artinfo)
Elle Macpherson Browses Frieze, $1.4 Million Rauch Leads Sales (Bloomberg)