Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

Matthew Wong Market Momentum Continues—but Slows—in $575,000 Sale on Loic Gouzer’s Fair Warning

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Karma exhibition 2018.

This market analysis 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.) 

Last week, Loic Gouzer's auction app, Fair Warning, sold Matthew Wong’s 2017 oil painting Far Away Eyes for $575,000. Drawing a total of 13 bidders, the final hammer price outpaced the conservative pre-sale estimate of $100,000 to $150,000 to show the continuing robust interest among buyers for the late painter's work. The orange-hued landscape is the sixth work by the artist, who died by suicide in December 2019, to surface at auction.

Though smaller, the painting bears a resemblance to the record-setting 2018 work, The Realm of Appearances, sold for $1.82 million in Sotheby’s New York contemporary evening sale this June, which attracted a total of 58 bidders. The sale of Far Away Eyes marks the third highest public price achieved for Wong's work, next to the 2018 interior Mood Room, which sold at Phillips in a contemporary evening sale for $848,000 against a low estimated value of $60,000 in July.

Although the small set of recent sales is not comprehensive, the near seven-week run for Wong's market has yielded a trajectory typical of market performances for emerging commercial sensations—which tend to cool after an initial period of competitive bidding. Young figurative painter Tschabalala Self’s work went through a similar course, following the sale of her painting Star at Phillips in 2019, which sold for $350,000 against an estimate between $80,000 and $120,000. The work realized a 3,400 percent increase in value for the consignor who bought the work for around $10,000. Her record was achieved in February 2020 at Phillips, with the sale of Princess for $567,736, but the Spring and Summer auction series proved to be quiet for the artist. Posthumous sales of painter Noah Davis’s works also saw prices driven up rapidly in the past year, following a recent retrospective at David Zwirner. Davis’s In Search of Gallerius Maximumianus (2009) set a new record for the late artist, selling for $400,000 during Phillips March New Now sale, beating its high estimate of $80,000.

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Zao Wou-Ki, Sanyu Dominate Hong Kong Modern and Contemporary 2020 Sales: Analysis

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Sotheby's Modern Art evening sale Hong Kong. Courtesy Sotheby's.

This report on the Summer auctions 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.) 

In July 2020, Hong Kong Modern and Contemporary art evening and day sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips brought in HK $2.64 billion ($341 million). French-Chinese artists led this season: Zao Wou-Ki generated HK$617 million, Sanyu HK$505 million and Chu Teh-Chun HK$143 million – the three artists accounted for 48% of the total modern and contemporary sales.

July 2020 Hong Kong Modern and Contemporary Evening Sales Figures

The evenings sales achieved a combined total of HKD 2.2 billion ($289 million), seeing a powerful 95% sell-through rate yielding 143 sold lots from 151 offered. Like the New York modern and contemporary art sales, the top ten percent of the evening sales account for slightly more than half of the total sales volume. Works by Zao Wou-Ki, Sanyu, Liu Ye and David Hockney were among the highest sellers. Five Sanyu works were sold in the evening sales, making a total of HKD 490 million together and accounting for 21% of the evening sale total.

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Joan Mitchell’s Rise Amid the Market’s Reappraisal: Analysis

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Joan Mitchell. 12 Hawks at 3 O'Clock (1960). Courtesy Christie's.

Known for her gestural style, Joan Mitchell was a key member of the second generation of American Abstract Expressionists and is now among the leading market forces in the 20th century. She was unique among her contemporaries, having gained acclaim in the early 1950s at a time when recognition of women artists was sparse. Despite the critical attention, Mitchell’s oeuvre has long been undervalued next to the work of her male peers.

As the market exhausts its run with Mitchell's New York school contemporaries, she is now being reevaluated as one of the last artists of the Ab-Ex generation yet to be fully explored, according to curators of her upcoming retrospective. From 2007 to 2019, her auction turnover has increased by 123% from $28 million in annual sales to $62.6 million. Her record price has followed that trend with an increase of 130% from $7 million achieved in 2007 to $16.6 million in 2018. With the rise in prices, the volume of Mitchell's works traded at auction has also increased 130% since 2007.

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Roy Lichtenstein and The Pop Art Masterpiece Market: Analysis

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Roy Lichtenstein in front of one of his paintings at an exhibition in Stedelijk Museum.

This report on the Roy Lichtenstein market using data provided by Pi-eX 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.) 

No artist is more closely associated with Pop art than Roy Lichtenstein, the painter who helped to usher in post-modernism by elevating mass-culture comic strips into high art. Despite his unquestionable historical importance and broad recognition beyond art collectors and museums, Lichtenstein's market has somewhat lagged even as the art market exploded over the last two decades. His prolific peer Andy Warhol played a central role in the growth of Contemporary art prices that Lichtenstein had not, that is, until relatively recently. From there it has been a slow burn but still a bright one.

In 2012, the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate London collaborated on a retrospective that brought the artist new attention. In response, auction results rose. A report published by London-based Pi-eX analyzed Lichtenstein's 2007 to 2019 sales from the evening auctions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips. (For clarity, Pi-eX uses hammer prices, not prices with the buyer's premium added. Consequently, all prices in this report will be based upon the hammer prices.) Pi-eX found the highest number works (between 25 and 30) traded in 2013, the year following the Lichtenstein survey. The evening sale lots generated $80 million in sales with another $60.5 million taking place throughout the year, according to public auction records.

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KAWS From the Bottom Up

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The street artist is becoming a museum mainstay as the lower end of this collectible and editioned market continues to rise.

This commentary by Marion Maneker 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.)

Don’t Hate Him Because He Sells Well

GQ has a profile by KAWS hype man, Arty Nelson, pegged to the MOCAD show of the artist’s work that just closed a few days ago.  Nelson covers all of the familiar territory about KAWS’s career as a creator of cultural ephemera that has risen to the height of collectible value. With continuing market growth and increasing institutional alacrity to elevate his work, KAWS has nearly become an instant cliché.

Nelson cannot help himself when he describes the trajectory of the artist Brian Donnelly’s career as KAWS since the 2008 show at Emmanuel Perrotin’s gallery in Miami that was first brokered by the music producer Pharrell. “Donnelly was shot out of a cannon,” Nelson writes, “with bells on and one of those batting helmets with beer holsters and tubes running directly to the mouth.”

With that kind of awkward hyperbole, perhaps we shouldn’t put too much stock in Nelson’s take on the art market. Breathless recitations of recent auction sales are hardly the best way to evaluate an artist’s value or relevance. Nevertheless, it’s clear that there is something significant taking place in the parallel rise of KAWS’s market and his steady march toward institutional acceptance and veneration.

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