Colin Gleadell compares art market indices using Gerhard Richter’s work which promises to light up next week’s sales as the painter’s abstract works continue to rise toward common currency among the world’s Ultra High Networth Undividuals:

According to Artnet, the online facility which stores the most widely used database of auction prices and has just launched a new index which analyses market performances, Richter prices have increased by nearly 600 per cent in ten years. That’s a greater growth rate than for Damien Hirst or Andy Warhol. In a graph prepared specially for the Daily Telegraph, Richter outperforms a composite group of the 50 highest ranking contemporary artists with a phenomenal spurt in the last four years in which his annual auction sales leapt from $77 million in 2010 to $199 million last year.

To confirm the point, Art Market Research, which has for long been producing art indices for companies such as insurance company Hiscox and The Financial Times using a slightly different methodology, has constructed a similar graph on Richter prices. In the four years since 2007 when the marked has peaked, adjusted sharply downwards and then recovered more or less, Richter prices at auction have increased by 319 percent, compared to Warhol’s 109 percent. In a recent poll conducted by ArtTactic, yet another market analyst, Richter is the artist collectors and investors have most confidence in for the future.

Gerhard’s Off the Richter Scale (Telegraph)