This report on the Sotheby's Contemporary Evening sale in Hong Kong sale for July 2020 by Angelica Villa is available to AMMpro subscribers. (The first month of AMMpro is free and subscribers are welcome to sign up for the first month and cancel before they are billed.)
After Sotheby's successful Hong Kong modern evening auction on Wednesday, the contemporary evening sale on Thursday brought in HKD 595 million ($76.8 million) across 39 lots, with only three lots failing to find buyers, leading to a 94 percent sell-through rate.
Overall, Hong Kong demonstrated solid demand for high-value art, the previous day's sale maintaining totals near 2019 levels, and today's sale followed suit. David Hockney’s 30 Sunflowers from 1996—one of two of his large-scale floral paintings—sold for $14.8 million, exceeding its estimate of HKD 80 million ($10.3 million) and making it the second most expensive work by a Western artist to sell at an auction in Asia. Prior to its sale in a Phillips New York contemporary auction in May 2011 for $2.5 million, the painting had had only one owner. The sale's international exhibition tour, scheduled for Los Angeles, Jakarta, Hong Kong, and Taipei, was interrupted in February by global closures sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Sign up to Art Market Monitor Premium today
You need a membership to AMMpro to view this article and other exclusive content daily.
You can register today for $90 per month—with your first month free!—or for $756 per year (no free trial period.)
If you already have an account, sign in here:
