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Auction Reaction: Koji Inoue and Kim Heirston Discuss Sotheby’s October 2020 Evening Sale

November 23, 2020 by Marion Maneker

“There was cooling, a lot of cooling last night,” Kim Heirston says of the $284 million Sotheby’s Live-stream Evening auction held on October 28th. Speaking at Spring Studios for Art Market Monitor and ARTnews Live’s Auction Reaction video Heirston continued, “you can spin it any way you want but there was cooling. It was admirably dealt with and looked better in the end but there was legitimately a lot of bullets dodged.”

“Everything has changed but nothing has changed,” says Koji Inoue, International Senior Director of Postwar and Contemporary Art at Hauser & Wirth, adds in the video, “in the sense that the way we are interacting has changed.” The new format of live-stream sales hasn’t changed “the structure of the sales, the balance and the works that are there.”

“When the right material comes to market,” Inoue continues, “the buyers are there.”Continue Reading

Eclectic London Dealer Daniel Katz Clears £2.3 M. at Sotheby’s

June 4, 2020 by Colin Gleadell

Walter Sickert, Coin de la Rue Sainte Catherine, Dieppe (£15–£20k) £137,500

This report on the results of Sotheby’s Refining Taste sale of work from dealer Danny Katz’s collection by Colin Gleadell 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.) 

Sotheby’s was the chosen cyber venue for dealer/collector, Danny Katz, whose special interests range from Renaissance bronzes to modern British art. Katz, who just turned 72, is a big spender when something excites him, like the Egyptian bronze antiquity he bought at Christie’s in 2012 for £3.7 million against a £400,000 estimate—a record for an Egyptian antiquity. But this felt more like a backroom clearance, with 144 lots priced mostly under £40,000, with several under £10,000. Some items had no reserve so Katz was prepared to let them go for almost nothing, although none did. A small 1960s work on paper by Scottish abstract expressionist Alan Davie had no reserve and was really a giveaway at £2,000 to £3,000, but 44 bids later it realized a reasonable £13,750. With 24 hours to go, 45 of the 144 lots had no bids and had not met reserves, but, with the help of twice-daily email alerts in Sotheby’s newsletters, only 11 were left unsold, and the sale reached an encouraging £2.3 million ($2.8 million), easily surpassing the £1.2 million low estimate.Continue Reading

New Growth in an Old Market: February 2020 London Impressionist and Modern Art Sales Analysis

February 21, 2020 by Angelica Villa

Tamara de Lempicka’s Portrait of Marjorie Ferry set a record price for the painter—again—in London with a sale for £16.3m

The February sales of Impressionist and Modern art in London saw a decrease of one third from the previous year—the combined Evening and Day, which came to £207.5m were down 30% from the £298m total achieved in February 2019. The season’s top lots were by Magritte and Łempicka reflecting market growth around a reinvigorated demand for Surrealism and works made in the 1920s-1930s. The surge in prices for these two artists suggest that works from this period are beginning to see valuations closer to works from the Impressionist and Modern periods. Still, the Evening sale lots in 2020 had a lower average price in comparison to last year’s equivalent sale.

Continuing a trend seen in New York’s Impressionist and Modern sales last November, the Day sales of Impressionist and Modern art were much stronger than in the past with solid bidding and rising prices for lower value lots.

Across the February Evening and Day sales, only four lots were sold for prices above £10m. In last year’s February London sales, a total of seven lots sold above £10m, marking a decline in the overall combined value of the top lots. In February 2019, the top ten lots totaled £109.6m; in 2020, that figure is £96.5m. In 2019, the top ten lots in the Evening sales accounted for 59% of the Evening sales’ total; in 2020, that share rose by 3% to 62%. The strength of the sales came in their stronger sell-through rates and better hammer ratios.Continue Reading

Amoako Boafo Gets Phillips to £21.2m, Closing a Less Than Boffo Week of London Cont Sales

February 13, 2020 by Angelica Villa

Amoako Boafo, The Lemon Bathing Suit (2019), £675,000
Amoako Boafo, The Lemon Bathing Suit (2019), £675,000

Phillips London evening sale of contemporary art saw a solid night of sales with an 86% sell-through rate, achieving a total of £21.2 million ($27.7 million). As with the other houses, this figure is down from the previous year’s comparable sale, which achieved £37.03 million ($48.43 million) with a smaller group of 29 lots offered last year compared to this year’s 37 lots. Four works were withdrawn before bidding began, but the well-managed and fast-paced sale saw high interest in key lots and a strong performance, with the total sale proceeds reaching slightly above pre-sale low estimate of £18.2 million (estimates do not include the buyer’s premium.)

Overall, the sale’s outcome continues this week’s trend in the contemporary art market as top prices shift to the middle-market below $5 million. This movement has various consequences. Most notably, it means houses are pressed to focus on cultivating a core market of less-seasoned collectors.

The first four lots drew aggressive protracted bidding and each reached their high estimates with interest from buyers in Hong Kong highlighted by the auctioneer. Amoako Boafo’s The Lemon Bathing Suit (2019) achieved a high price of £675,000, a major success for the one-year-old painting and the first of the artist’s works to come up at auction. It reached more than ten times its high estimate of £50,000. Los-Angeles based dealer/collector, Stefan Simchowitz, was the seller. The brash dealer is known for his aggressive trading of works by promising young artists. Several other lots that experienced strong bidding and provided the sale’s high energy were from young painters like Julie Curtiss and Eddie Martinez. Tschabalala Self, who had uncharacteristically tepid results at Christie’s and Sotheby’s this week (the works sold only slightly above estimates), saw a new record for Princess (2017.) The painting doubled its low estimate of £150,000 and sold for £435,000 ($567,501), reassuring the market that the artist’s potential remains far from fully realized.

The night’s top lots included Ed Ruscha’s God Knows Where (2014), which sold for £3.37 million ($4.4 million), landing strongly between the estimate of £2.5 to 3.5 million. The second highest lot was Keith Haring’s Untitled (1981) tarpaulin sold for £3.29 million ($4.29 million) with fees, a solid result just slightly over its £3 million low estimate.

Damien Hirst had four of seven lots in the sale from the collection of Robert Tibbles, who amassed a holding of edgy works from the Young British Artist’s movement of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Each work saw highly competitive initial interest but bidding tapered off after breaking the low estimate. Hirst’s medicine cabinet Bodies (1989) made price of £1.37 million ($1.79 million). A large dot painting, more than eight feet wide, titled Antipyrylazo III (1994) sold for £1.3 million ($1.7 million); its high estimate was £1.2 million. Hirst remains an auction staple but these works provided evidence of stronger interest in the artist than sometimes registers in the market.

Th next tier of top selling lots including Sean Scully’s Robe Green Gold (2018) and El Anatsui’s Affirmation (2014), which both sold for around $1.2M. Jai Aili’s The Young (2012) performed similarly, achieving £855,000 ($1.1 million) well above a high estimate of £600,000.

Eddie’s Martinez’s Neanderthal Jeans (2014) started with a handful of interested bidders. The final price of £375,000 ($489,150) reached slightly above its £300,000 high estimate, sustaining the artist’s success at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, still substantially below the artist’s 2014 record price of $2M.

Only a few lots failed to reach their low estimates, yet these works still saw lively opening bids. A.R. Penck, whose work set a record at the Sotheby’s Evening sale, just made the low estimate tonight with a black and white painting that sold for £200,000.

The final sale of the evening was a monochrome work by Roman Opałka, which exceeded its estimates. It sold for £471,000 ($614,419.) To create that success, Phillips had to set the estimates below a similar work sold last year at Christie’s evening sale. That work made £791,250 with fees ($973,846 USD).

The results at Phillips reflect a challenging market where much of the action has moved into private sales at galleries. This shift actually plays to Phillips’s advantage. As results thin in the top sector, attention shifts to the enduring interest in emerging artists and the value market. Phillips has long held a strong position here and its smaller drop in sales volume reflects that, in part.

 

 

Swann African American Sales, 2009-2019

April 7, 2019 by Marion Maneker

This analysis of Swann Galleries’s African American art sales in New York is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscriptions begin with a free month for the curious.

Swann Galleries has developed the African American art market with a singular focus for a decade. Their sales have helped define the category for collectors, locate works and provide a measure of demand. Over the decade, sales totals have almost quadrupled. The following charts break that growth into finer detail.

Much of the market interest comes from the rising value of particular artists who drive the category. This season, Norman Lewis’s Block Island led the sale with a $389k price, far from his most valuable price at auction which is $965k which was achieved in the Fall of 2015.

Swann’s sales have developed the market for artists like Barkley Hendricks where other houses have gone on to tap broader pools of collectors to push the prices even higher. Continue Reading

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