It’s been Oscar Murillo’s week in London with stunning sales at all three auction houses. This evening Phillips sold the above untitled work for £146,000 above a £30,000 high estimate. That caps off the sales Dan Duray highlighted on GalleristNY:
A 2011 painting by the artist Oscar Murillo, who was born in 1986, went for an impressive $391,475 at the Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary day sale in London yesterday, surpassing a previous record by a factor of 10.
Mr. Murillo followed up that auction high today at the London Sotheby’s Contemporary day sale, with a work from 2012 that sold for $177,456.
Judd Tully spoke to the buyer of Phillips’s work to get a sense of the demand:
There was a surge of bidding for market rising Columbian artist Oscar Murillo as “Untitled” from 2011, a bravura oil, paper, and debris on canvas abstract painting scaled at six feet by five and a half feet sold for multiples of its high estimate, making £146,500 ($224,145) (est. £20-30,000). The buyer, who declined to give her full name but said it was “Antonella F,” is a young Columbian collector who lives some of the time in Miami and has a private art fund for young artists. “We learned about Murillo at Art Basel last month.”
Colin Gleadell adds some more details to the Murillo story:
Looking at his very short career to date it is clear this artist is heading somewhere. He has been artist in residence at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, a place where many a reputation has been formed. He has been bought in depth by Charles Saatchi, and this summer presented an installation at the prestigious Art Basel fair. He has shown with many galleries, though most, like the Carlos Ishikawa gallery in London, are not associated with high prices. However, he will be included in a group show next month at the David Zwirner gallery in New York, which is.
The art world has clearly been abuzz with the sound of Murillo’s name. At Phillips, his work was bought by an art fund (that is, an investment vehicle) based in Miami. At Christie’s, there had been unprecedented media attention from Colombia before the sale, and bidding came from four different continents, including South America. A collector told me there was talk that the artist was being head-hunted by the White Cube gallery, an unconfirmed rumour of the kind that fuels speculation and spikes prices.
Oscar Murillo Painting Sells For $391,475 in London (GalleristNY)
Oscar Murillo and Glenn Brown Boost Phillips’s $18.9M London Sale (Artinfo)
A New Globalism Hits the Contemporary Art Market Sales (Telegraph)
