On Friday, Sotheby’s announced that Margherita Maccapani Missoni, heir to her family’s eponymous Italian fashion house will partner as a guest curator for the auction house’s eighth edition of its Contemporary Curated sale in London, which will open bidding from April 14-21^st.

The sales will feature pieces by both lesser-known and blue-chip contemporary artists such as Eddie Martinez, Damien Hirst, Yayoi Kusama, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Alighiero Boetti, Yoshitomo Nara and George Condo, among others. Carrying more affordable price points, the ‘Contemporary Curated’ series remains an opportunity for collectors to explore new and established artist’s markets. Guest curation by luxury tastemakers has become a staple across Sotheby’s contemporary segment —hosting Dior Homme director Kim Jones in the March New York series, as well as Roksanda Ilincic, Jill Stuart and Victoria Beckham lending an eye in past seasons.

Describing her artistic inclinations as “irresistibly drawn and simultaneously repulsed by grotesque aesthetics” Missoni’s selection of highlights from the sale find intrigue in the radically unpalatable that threads throughout emerging contemporary art. Among the highlights on offer in the sale include Yayoi Kusama’s 1993 Star, featuring the artist’s signature obsessive repeated patterning estimated at £150,000–200,000, as well as Monir Farmanfarmaian’s steel-and-painted-mirrored-glass piece Geometry of Hope from 1975 slated with an estimate of £300,000–400,000. Another work, Pfeifenköpfe (Box #2), by artist Albert Oehlen, known for merging the crude and the neutral, features a pink-hued print adorned with three pipes which is priced an estimate of £20,000-30,000.

A collector in her own right, Missoni recalls of the conceptual artist William Anastasi, whose work is included in the auction, “I once read ‘if Duchamp’s aim was to kill art, Anastasi displays the corpse, in various stages of decay.’ I still can’t find better words to describe his ingenius artistic journey.”

Missoni is the granddaughter of Ottavio and Rosita Missoni, founders of the fashion label established in 1953. Recently-appointed as the creative director to the brand’s millennial sub-label, the heiress carries the aesthetic legacy signature to the globally renowned knitwear company that gained notoriety in the 1970s for its bold maximalism. Following their inaugural runway show in 1967 in Florence, the house attracted international interest among fashion industry leaders, and under the direction of two generation of Missoni women, the label became internationally recognized for its signature bold print and pattern motif referential to the seminal eras of Italian fashion.

The Italian house is a pioneer among its contemporary brands, which boasts 65 years in business with art direction run solely by Missoni descendants — the business model is a rarity in the luxury industry. Coinciding with the younger Missoni’s assignment to the brand’s offshoot label, in 2018, Missoni sold a minority of its stake to an Italian state-backed private equity fund with plans of expansion.

Levy Gorvy announced today a new exhibition of works by renowned French abstract expressionist painter, Pierre Soulages, available to the public via their inaugural online viewing room that will run until April 17^th.

Currently the subject of a major solo retrospective at Paris’s Musée du Louvre, the museum is honoring the decades-long career of the seminal painter, who to-date is only the third living artist in the museum’s history, next to Picasso and Chagall to be featured in a solo exhibition. Despite the career bookending milestone, the centenarian artist continues to produce work.

Following his military service in the 1940s, Soulages returned to Paris where he began seriously painting, and became established among the Jeune École de Paris (Young School of Paris) of abstract expressionists. Although he has been compared to Ab-Ex contemporaries such as Mark Rothko and Franz Kline, with whom he shared an existential sensibility, his approach was radical in its rejection of traditional uses of color. Famed for his signature deep black palette set against a neutral ground, Soulages’s practice garnered the label outrenoir, meaning “beyond black.” Soulages achieved his quintessential aesthetic by using a palette knife to apply the thick black paint – treating it as a building material, rather than a pigment. “Like this” — the painter narrates in a film that coincides Levy Gorvy’s viewing room — “it produces striations, with varying depth, which make the light vibrate.” For Soulages, the deep black was a source of gravity, from which he could build depth.

Light Out of Darkness features three 2019 works from his ongoing Outrenoir series, initiated in the 1980s. Each of the paintings carries a thick black impasto covering the entire canvas, as light refracts on the paint’s gloss making the works appear sculptural. Even at his age, the works indicate Soulages range in continuing to adapt his painterly legacy.

With the coronavirus pandemic having forced closure of most major auction houses worldwide, Sotheby’s has announced staff furloughs, pay cuts, and layoffs across its global offices. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Sotheby’s, which employs around 1,700 people across all of its locations, will furlough 12 percent of its staff members, or around 200 employees. (Sotheby’s representatives have yet to confirm an exact number.) On Wednesday, Sotheby’s CEO Charles F. Stewart revealed the company’s furlough and pay cut plans in a remote town hall meeting.

After the article was published, Christie’s also announced it would start furloughing staff based in Europe. As part of the plan, the house will lay off some temporary outside contractors and enact a voluntary salary sacrifice for a segment of the company’s highest-earning employees.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Sotheby’s will be carrying out a 20 percent pay cut for its remaining employees in the U.S. and the U.K. whose jobs will be retained, as well as an additional 10 percent pay cut for executives, according to a staff-wide internal message. The report also said that overtime pay and performance-based incentive compensation will be temporarily suspended.

In the past several weeks, the house has majorly restructured its sales schedule. With the majority of its live auctions canceled, the house has shifted to private sales and has been rapidly expanding its online offerings in various fine art and luxury categories. Yesterday, Sotheby’s announced a set of new online 20th century day sales that will replace its live auctions, underlining the house’s commitment to going digital during the pandemic. So far, the house has been forced to close 10 of its salesrooms and around 80 of its global offices following the CDC’s policy guidelines issued in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In a statement provided by a Sotheby’s representative, the house said its leadership remains focused on its client engagement and in maintaining the company’s various services during this period. A representative from Christie’s headquarters in the U.K. echoed the same priority oriented towards the company’s auxiliary platforms, noting “our core teams remain in place to support our clients through Private sales, Online sales and to collate sales to be ready to service when live auctions recommence.”

With the gallery sector’s spaces closed for the remainder of Spring, many dealers have taken to expanding online platforms to make their previously scheduled exhibitions accessible to the public. On Thursday, Di Donna Galleries announced it will launch its first online viewing space, featuring a solo exhibition of works by key modernist painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. The virtual exhibition is just one segment of a traveling series held in collaboration with modern and contemporary dealers, Paris-based Jeanne Bucher, and Waddington Custot of London.

A key postwar artist, Vieira da Silva’s early career in Paris among the avant-garde of postwar abstractionist lead to a storied contribution to modern painting. In the late 1920s, Lisbon-born Vieira da Silva came to the city to pursue formal arts training where she became established within the European abstract expressionist movement, Art Informel – a period which rejected American Ab-Ex exceptionalism and took to Eastern philosophy to reconsider standards of perception in modern painting. In Paris, she worked and lived among Cubist painters such as Joaquín Torres-García and Italian Futurists, whose styles became influential to her later signature style of maze-like tiling and depth-field play. During the 1940s following the start of the war, the artist moved from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, until 1947 before her eventual return to Paris.

Also influenced by contemporaries such as Fernand Leger, with whom she studied in her adolescence, Vieira da Silva cultivated a unique style of abstraction that broke rules of formalist tradition. Her representations responded to the impact of WWII atrocity on surrounding locales. Surveying street views and urban labyrinth – her paintings envisioned disorientation in the metropolitan modern perspective – they came to display a more globally-oriented and fragmented vision— reacting to the war’s onset of transnational displacement.

Among the highlights of the exhibition, Les Joueurs de cartes dated 1947-48 and Figure de ballet from the same year encapsulate the artist’s skill in reimagining structural planes to depict figurative illusions. Inspired by card games and the ballet, the works nod to a deceptive spatial recession for which she gained notoriety. Her 1955 Sans Titre, painted during a seminal moment in the artist’s career upon her return to Paris from exile — the work features a signature grid central to the overall cast of the painting’s surface, from which she built out an abstraction of gestural elements that invoke the cityscape.

By the early 1940s, the artist was already established as one of the defining cultural figures of the 20th century— selected to show in Peggy Guggenheim’s Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century in New York. In 1961, she won the Grand Prize for Fine Arts at the Biennale in Sao Paulo and in 1966, was the first woman awarded the French Grand Prix Nationale des Arts. With works in the permanent collections of several major institutions such as MoMA, the Tate, and Centre Pompidou, etc., her place as a postwar staple has stood the test of time and outlasted an art market canon that has omitted works by important female modernists.

In the offering at Di Donna’s online space, the works available carry prices ranging from $70,000 to $2 million. Within the last decade, the artist’s market has risen significantly, exceeding the seven-figure mark in 2010. Her 1944 seminal painting L’Incendie I (The Fire I) set the current auction record of $2.8 million in Christie’s London contemporary evening sale in 2018. Nonetheless, her market has been historically undervalued relative to her contemporaries such as Jean Dubuffet, Nicolas de Stael, and Jean Fautrier. The gallery’s director, Emmanuel Di Donna confirmed Vieira da Silva’s international market potential having “consistently reached a strong audience in Europe in the last 30 years.”

Di Donna, who noted that Vieira da Silva’s works is now growing in prominence within the global market, said “the recent rise in attention to her work is in large part due to an increasing appreciation for post-war European art, where the market has been historically focused on American post-war such as the Abstract Expressionists.” Di Donna further emphasized this crucial moment in the market’s attention citing “an increased focus on the women artists who have been up-to-recently overshadowed by their male peers.”

Sotheby’s has postponed their May live sales of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art (including the marquee Evening sales) and announced a series of online Contemporary Art and Impressionist and Modern Art Day sales in their place that will each run between May 4 to mid-May.

The upcoming online Day Sales will comprise works by modern and contemporary artists that have historically driven the day sale market. Additionally, Sotheby’s will add another online sale of Post-Impressionist paintings to the spring online sale calendar which will open on April 23rd.

Among the highlights in the contemporary category include Richard Prince’s 1987 three-part acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas titled 3 Jokes Painted to Death or 3 Jokes Really Painted estimated between $500-700,000.

Sotheby’s Head Day Sales of Impressionist & Modern Art in New York, Scott Niichel, confirmed that the offerings in the forthcoming online sales will “be anchored by the same top-quality, exciting selection of works by sought-after artists of the 19th through the 21st centuries.” Emphasizing the necessity in engaging with clients through these rapid changes to the sales schedule, Niichel remarked “we are still actively – and responsibly – sourcing for these auctions, and encourage collectors to start a dialogue with us about how we can best meet their needs.”

Part of the initiative to further develop digital sale offerings comes with the imperative to both retain its top sector buying base, and to attract new collectors who are becoming increasingly savvy to virtual transaction. Max Moore, Co-Head of Sotheby’s New York Day Auctions of Contemporary Art remains optimistic that the online series will meet demand for these higher priced works, saying “our global clientele has an extensive and demonstrated history of transacting at elevated price points in our live sales.”

In previous announcements the house noted its extensive investment in digital technology to expand online collecting. With confidence that the higher price echelon of the Day sale segment will remain active online, Moore noted that “in 2019 for example, more than half of the thousands of bidders in our Contemporary Art auctions placed their bids online.” With plans also to the release a new e-catalogue design coinciding with each of their future sales across the business, Sotheby’s hopes to attend to the expanding digital collecting approach.

Reporting an excess of $35 million achieved in its 2020 online sales so far across various sale categories which include Modern and Contemporary African Art, 20th Century Middle Eastern Art, 20th Century Design, and Photographs, the house is seeing a solid level of bidding that negates notions throughout the industry that the market has slowed. Another one of Sotheby’s representatives, Nicole Schloss, New York’s Co-Head of Day Auctions of Contemporary Art noted that this continuous participation by collectors online is “driving results that demonstrate the resilience of the global art market.”

The announcement of a new set of day sales featuring top-tier works is a big change for the seasonal market schedule with larger implications for movement to the global schedule in the fall. Sotheby’s has yet to confirm plans for its postponed live New York Evening and Day auctions of modern, contemporary and American art initially scheduled for May.