After last week’s blockbuster live-streamed remote modern and contemporary auctions, on Wednesday, Sotheby’s staged its modern evening sale at the Hong Kong Convention Center. The sale brought in HK$826 million ($107 million) across 35 lots, seeing an almost perfect sell-through rate with just one lot failing to find a buyer.

The auction reached the second highest outcome for the sale category at Sotheby’s, topping last year’s result for the March evening sale that brought in $102.4 million for 39 lots. The July evening auction also realized four new artist records.

Unlike the New York evening auction which brought a new level of art market hype to global audiences— likened by viewers to a televised game-show— this auction went back to basics, featuring a flat one-camera view focused solely on the sale’s auctioneer, Ian McGinlay, Head of Sotheby’s Asia Client Strategy. McGinlay conversed with masked colleagues in the televised live stream before announcing the withdrawal of just one lot before the sale began.

The leading lot of the night was by French-Chinese postwar artist Sanyu, whose 1950s masterwork Quatre nus (Four Nudes) announced for sale in the Fall. It sold for HKD 258.3 million ($33.3 million), the result of a growing value for Sanyu’s work, particularly this series of nudes which appeals to the growing Asian’ collecting base. Bidding for the piece began at HKD 160 million, and after a long period drawn out by the auctioneer that realised 21 bids, the work hammered at HKD 225 million, below its pre-sale expectation of HKD 250 million. The masterpiece last sold for HKD 16.36 million ($2.1 million) at Christies Hong Kong sale in 2005 and is one of just six of Sanyu’s paintings featuring nudes in a group of three or more.Continue Reading

Last week, leading contemporary works brought in high numbers in the marquee evening auctions, a sign that market is still meeting global demand for expensive works. The last major market test of the season will come with Christie’s upcoming global hybrid evening sale titled ONE scheduled to take place on July 10.

Among the works recently announced is contemporary painter Cecily Brown’s dynamic Carnival and Lent completed between 2006-2008. The work carries an estimated value between £4 million to £6 million ($5 million to $7.5 million) and will go up for sale in the London session of Christie’s relay-format evening auction. If the work reaches its high estimate, it will be the most expensive work by the artist to sell both at auction and privately.

The guaranteed painting, standing at 97 inches by 103 inches, takes cues from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s 1559 work The Fight Between Carnival and Lent. Brown’s painting was originally purchased by the seller at Gagosian following the artist’s Fall 2008 solo survey, and has been in the hands of a private American collector since.Continue Reading

Christie’s global ONE auction scheduled for July 10^th has Picasso’s Baigneuses, sirènes, femme nue et minotaur completed in 1937—an autobiographical scene for the artist—which will go up for sale with an estimate of $6 million to $9 million in the New York session of the sale.

Acquired directly from Picasso’s estate before being held privately in the same family collection for more than eighty years, this is the first time the work will come to the market. The small-scale work—8 7/8 inches by 10 ½ inches— is an ink on board featuring a minotaur, a mythological beast with the head of a bull and the body of a man that Picasso often used as an avatar for himself, carrying a woman (presumed to be the artists’s mistress, Marie-Thérèse) amid a scene of encroaching sirens.Continue Reading

On Thursday, Phillips staged its marquee contemporary evening sale with a night of superior results led by staple talents like Joan Mitchell and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The sale comes on the heels of a five-hour-long global evening sale livestreamed at Sotheby’s three days earlier that garnered a total in excess of $360 million, securing the market long-awaited reassurance following the pandemic’s overhaul of the traditional auction schedule. The evening’s hour-long sale brought 25 lots led by auctioneer Henry Highley, and saw an overall 100 percent sell-through; the auction realized a total of $41 million, meeting the high estimate. The day sale total rang in at $10.2 million, sold 87 percent by lot.

The leading lot of the night was Joan Mitchell’s canvas Noël, featuring the artist’s thick, impasto drip field scheme from the early 1960s, consigned from an American collection. The painting met its reserve at $8 million quickly, but drew only six bids to meet its estimate of $9.5 million at the hammer ($11.1 million with buyer’s premium). In a press conference following the auction, Robert Manley dubbed the work “an auctioneer’s dream.” He noted that two bidders ultimately competed for the work, calling the end result a “knockout painting, for a knockout price.” The historic work came to market after nearly three decades in the same hands. The seller bought it in 1995 and the Phillips sale marks its auction debut. The painting’s outstanding result follows the sale of the storied Ginny Williams collection at Sotheby’s that reopened the market with aggressive remote bidding on Monday, bringing in new records for female postwar stars like Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, who have long been undervalued compared to their male contemporaries.Continue Reading