Art Market Monitor

In February, Phillips unveiled a painting by Ghanian-born, Vienna-based painter Amoako Boafo in their London Contemporary art Evening sale marking the first time a canvas by the coveted primary market artist would surface at auction. The work achieved a total of £675,000 (US $881,550), far surpassing the pre-sale estimate of £30,000-£50,000 (US $38,700-$64,500). Now, Phillips has another work by Boafo, the second to come to market to date, in a themed online contemporary sale of just 24 lots called Shaping the Surface.

Boafo’s Sleepy Lady (2019), a work on paper completed in 2019, estimated at between £15,000-20,000 is leads the sale with £85,000 bid, more than five times its low estimate. With bidding still open, few expect the sale to end with the 24 bids already cast. But time remains short. The sale ends at 2pm London time on Thursday, May 21st.

The one-year-old work has already changed hands twice. The consignor purchased the work from a private collection in Vienna. Similar to the artist’s widely recognized Black Diaspora series, a group of figurative portraits featuring Boafo’s approach to documenting Blackness and representing of the black image, the work is a strong example Boafo’s distinctive style. Boafo was educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He cites modernist Egon Schiele’s portraiture as a key historical reference in his practice and among his contemporary influences, names Lynnette Yiadom-Boakye, Jordan Casteel and Kerry James Marshall.

Boafo’s rise to prominence comes at the convergence of two market trends. One is the sustained demand for figurative painting; the other is a continuing interest in painters of African descent. That Boafo simultaneously draws inspiration from European modernism and imagery that has been missing from the vast canon of euro-centric art history makes his work seem to be almost engineered for market success. The market’s response has been immediate with works fresh off the primary market getting flipped at Phillips in direct response to marketing events like the 2019 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach.

Boafo’s star turn came with major backing by Miami-based contemporary collectors Don and Mera Rubell who have added the 36-year-old artist’s work to the holdings in their private museum and selected him for their artist residency program funded by the Knight Foundation. The artist is also being collected by public institutions. Last year, the City Museum of Miami bought Boafo’s Cobalt Blue Earring for $44,000 and at Paris’s FIAC fair October 2019, Mariane Ibrahim gallery sold Boafo’s Monica (2019) for $18,000. A recipient of the Walter Koschatzky Art Prize in 2017, Boako’s institutional backing includes the permanent collection of Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art and Vienna’s Albertina Museum.

Represented by Mariane Ibrahim gallery (of Chicago) and Roberts Projects (Los Angeles), which staged his U.S. showcase in January 2019 titled I See Me, he is also endorsed and collected by contemporary mainstays like Kehinde Wiley.

Among a group of artist outcasts living in Woodstock, New York in the early 1970s, famed postwar Ab-Ex-turned-figurative painter Philip Guston found a new creative energy by critiquing the fraught presidency of Richard Nixon. Following the release of his close friend and Woodstock neighbor Philip Roth’s Nixon inspired novel, Our Gang, Guston produced a notorious series of seething political cartoons in 1971 titled Poor Richard. A drawing from the period—eviscerating Nixon’s then Vice President, Spiro T. Agnew—carrying an estimate of $25,000-35,000 will come to auction in Bonhams Modern and Contemporary Art sale slated run from May 13-27.

A conservative known for his hawkish policies in the era of the Vietnam War, Agnew served as a right hand to Nixon is espousing criticism of liberal protest movements. At the height of the Nixon administration’s unraveling scandal, he famously derided the left and attacked the media in a 1969 speech in Des Moines, Iowa, eventually resigning from office in October 1973 after pleading guilty to fraud.  

The 1971 cartoon series of 180 drawings included satirical renderings of the 37th President’s trusted inner circle of Henry Kissinger, Spiro Agnew, and Attorney General John Mitchell. In the “Poor Richard” series, Guston established themes and motifs that would drive Guston’s late-period paintings featuring hooded Klansmen and severed limbs. The drawing series had a recent survey at Hauser & Wirth’s Los Angeles gallery titled ‘Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971’. The work on offer was a gift from the artist to friend, Dr. Barbara Sproul, professor and former partner of Phillip Roth. 

Among a selection of Renaissance era religious scenes and European Baroque master works, Sotheby’s Old Masters private sales department is now offering a small, meticulously painted floral still life by enigmatic Flemish painter Christoffel van den Berghe with an asking price of $1.2M.

Van den Berghe produced works in what was known as the prime era of 16th century Baroque painting. Rediscovered only in the 1950s, much of Van den Berghe’s life remains a mystery. A skilled landscape painter showing the influence of Jan Brueghel, the artists hyper-detailed painting is one of only four by the artist that are known to exist.

Despite little record of the artist’s career, he is believed to have been a member of the Middelburg guild of Saint Luke in the early 1620s. The work on offer shares key elements of another still painting dated 1624 titled Still Life with Dead Birds belonging to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The tulips work last changed hands in July 2013, in a Sotheby’s Old Masters evening sale, where it made $956,196, going for triple its low estimate of $250,000 and appreciating by 261% since its original sale in 2003 when it was bought for $332,800.Continue Reading

On Monday, the first edition of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern online Day sale achieved a solid total of $9.9 million, following a recent online sale record of $13.7 million set last week with the firm’s Contemporary art online Day sale. Offering a total of 103 lots, the sale saw a sell-through rate of 84 percent, and competition for artists long undervalued as demand for Impressionist works fades.

The highest selling lot of the auction’s offerings was Giorgio Morandi’s Natura Morta from 1951, one of the painter’s signature neutral still lifes that went for $1.58 million, just achieving its high estimate with a total of 9 bids. Edgar Degas’s small-scale 1876 portrait, Bust du jeune femme presque nue, which saw a total of eight bids and sold ultimately for $596,000, surpassing its low estimate of $450,000. Renoir’s countryside landscape from 1915 also met its high presale estimate of $500,000 after collecting 9 bids. Camille Pissarro’s 1882 winter farm picture sold for $560,000, landing well above its high estimate of $350,000.Continue Reading

Last week, Christie’s announced a new date and format for the marquee modern and contemporary sales with a Global Sale of the 20th Century to take places across four sessions hosted in different international headquarters on July 10th, where Roy Lichtenstein’s large scale 1994 canvas Nude with Joyous Painting, carrying a value of $30 million will star in the New York session.

Hailing from an American collection, Nude with Joyous Painting is from Lichtenstein’s renowned nudes series completed at the end of this career. The artist’s depiction of female heroines throughout his practice originated with an early fixation on images of women from popular comic books and stills of distressed actresses. These women became the central figures around which Lichtenstein constructed romantic fantasies. In the work on offer, the image is a reproduction from Girls’ Romances, a romantic comic series published by DC Comics from 1950-71.

The work on offer at Christie’s represents signature elements from different periods of Lichtenstein’s career. “Nude with Joyous Painting is an iconic example of Lichtenstein’s series of Nudes,” says Ana Maria Celis, Head of Evening Sale, Post-War and Contemporary Art. “This tour-de-force of Pop Art marks his return to the comic book heroines that launched his career in the early 60s. In this work, the beautiful heroine is caught in dramatic moment of suspense in stark contrast to a jubilant interior scene”Continue Reading