Sotheby’s Contemporary day sale = £16.1m; Christie’s PWC day sale = £16.8m with a record price for Alex Katz
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Phillips Evening sale performed well with 25 out of 28 lots sold or a 89% sell-through rate. As with all of this week’s sales, the sell-through rates were helped by third-party guarantees or otherwise perspicacious sale management. A couple of lots without support were sold at greatly compromised prices but sold nonetheless.
The Gerhard Richter jet made a decent £13.5m hammer price which worked out to £15.5m with fees or $20m. Three or four bidders drove the work to a 20% discount from the last ill-fated sale. So the buyer got a decent price but not a huge bargain.
Phillips was in no mood for another sale to fall through with the defalcation of the previous buyer and the tremor of Sotheby’s own champagne-glass waving bidder who backed out on Tuesday night. Bidders on the Richter jet were required to be pre-approved by the auction house.
Roy Lichtenstein’s editioned enamel sold to the guarantor for £4.5m hammer, a fate not substantially different from a similar work sold earlier in the week.
Farther down the top ten list we begin to find the works that had sustained competition. Those include Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (Velveeta), which continued the week’s strong interest in Basquiat lots priced in the six and seven figures, and Cecily Brown’s Armed and Fearless which got bid to a premium price more than twice the high estimate.
Sotheby’s London Contemporary Day sale = £16.1m
Sotheby’s posted £16,106,625 ($21,175,380) for their London Contemporary day sale coming in a little below the range of the pre-sale estimate of £14.2-20.1m.
- The lead lot was Keith Haring’s Untitled from 1983, which £975,000 ($1.3m) over a £600k high estimate.
- Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild from 1993, made £879k ($1.2m) over a £700k high estimate.
- Anselm Kiefer’s Walfisch (2000), a three meter wide work, sold for £495k ($650k)
- Robert Indiana’s LOVE sold for £675k ($887k)
- Rose Wylie’s Listening to Miss S from 1993, achieved £106,250 ($139,687)
Christie’s PWC Day Sale = £16.8m
Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Auction made £16,812,375 ($22,125,085) with 84% of the lots sold.
- In their evening sale, Christie’s put a weak version of a Cy Twombly drawing similar to the one that sold during day. The day lot was featured and attracted 10 bidders eventually selling for £2,471,250 ($3,252,165)
- Alex Katz’s Ada and Louise made an auction record of £947,250 ($1,246,580)