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Emerging Dealers See Swift Sales at an Online-Only Edition of Hauser & Wirth’s June Art Fair

August 21, 2020 by Angelica Villa

Yuka Hasegawa, Spice Girls, oil on canvas, $3,800. Courtesy XYZ Collective, Tokyo.

With most major art fairs canceled, mega-galleries have stepped in to launch platforms meant to help their emerging colleagues. This month, Hauser & Wirth is helping to support the June Art Fair, an event meant to uphold young galleries that was launched last year by Esperanza Rosales and Christian Andersen. The first edition took place last year in a bunker in Basel, Switzerland, and with most major art events having gone digital, the June Art Fair has moved online, too.

Held in partnership with ArtReview magazine, the fair is now live on Hauser & Wirth’s website. Due to run through August 31, the fair includes 17 emerging international galleries hailing from 12 countries spanning Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East. “With this collaboration, we wanted to be able to support the wider artworld ecosystem and provide a platform for younger galleries and emerging artists who are affected by the physical cancellation of so many events in the art world,” said Neil Wenman, partner at Hauser & Wirth, in a statement.

Hauser & Wirth is not the only mega-gallery to have engineered a platform meant to support younger galleries—David Zwirner also recently unveiled a digital initiative intended to showcase works put up for sale by emerging enterprises. Such platforms can have commercial advantages for emerging dealers, especially since a small set of blue-chip galleries with robust online platforms are beginning to emerge as the key drivers of a burgeoning online market. According to the 2020 Hiscox Online Art Trade, 63 percent of the art companies surveyed were expecting mega-galleries to emerge as some of the biggest players in the online art market.

In interviews, dealers participating in June said that a fair such as this one has its benefits. “We do believe that this new model is here to stay, and it will develop over time and generate even more results,” said Nadia Gerazouni, director at Athens’s Breeder Gallery. “With fairs shifting to the virtual online format, the core of the sales tends to be to collectors we know through the gallery’s contacts and the infrastructure it built from its physical presence in major art fairs all these past years. Trust between a collector and a gallery takes longer to build online, and it is not as straightforward as a physical sale would be.”

Gerzouni said sales early on had been swift. The Breeder placed two paintings by Jannis Varelas priced between $$28,000 and $45,000 with European collections during the fair’s preview. After those sales, collectors began inquiring about Varelas’s earlier works, Gerzouni said—a sign that the exposure had already begun paying off.

With work for sale by high-profile artists such as Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Sky Hopinka, and Ulrike Müller, June’s offerings rival what is typically found at fairs like Art Basel and Frieze. Accordingly, it’s attracted galleries who typically show at those premier fairs. Los Angeles’s François Ghebaly gallery is among them, and at June, the enterprise sold out its showing of six oil and acrylic works by Cassi Namoda. Focused on the legacies of colonialism, the figurative works were priced between $4,500 and $14,000.

Vienna dealer Croy Nielsen sold Subaltern Autonomous Zone (2020), a figurative painting by Georgia Gardner Gray, for €20,000 (around $23,500). Tokyo gallery Misako and Rosen sold four abstract paintings by Margaret Lee—a cofounder of New York’s closely watched 47 Canal gallery—from her new series “I.C.W.U.M.” for $15,000 each. And Chicago’s Document gallery sold an untitled edition from 2018 by Sepuya, a photographer who figured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, to an American collector for $5,000 and placed three more works from a related series in an international collection.

Conceptual artworks can be a challenge to sell, but at June, they were already finding buyers. Tokyo’s XYZ collective brought works by Japanese artist Yuka Hasegawa. One piece, a Fendi sweatshirt replica, carried a pricetag of $2,600; another, titled Spice Girls, mimed the look of 18th-century paintings and was priced at $3,800.

Compared to something like Art Basel, June is a relatively small fair, but its size works to its advantage, dealers said. “This more boutique-size format is particularly compelling in that it both acknowledges and obviates the fatigue people might be experiencing from online fairs by keeping it tight and small, with solo presentations,” said a representative for Mexico City’s Lulu gallery. The gallery received inquiries for two works by Daniel Rios Rodriguez, including an oil and copper work tilted Quarantine Dream (2020) that was priced at $6,500 and a limestone on terra-cotta piece called Give me the Night that was priced at $7,500.

As the traditional art calendar becomes less relevant and online exhibitions take on greater prominence, emerging galleries are adjusting to the changes. “We have found that the online format takes much longer to confirm sales as the sense of urgency is gone,” said dealer Manuela Paz, of Puerto Rico’s Embajada gallery, which was selling works by Jorge González. “Still, an online fair gives an opportunity and an excuse to present and contextualize an artist’s practice, and partnerships such as the one between June and Hauser & Wirth provide a superior platform to do so, expanding our potential reach.”

Swiss Satellite Action

June 22, 2010 by Katherine Jentleson

Insider sale information from Sarah Douglas’s report on Scope Basel:

Brigitte Schenk

  • Marilyn Manson’s paintings, which range from €36,000–90,000 ($53,000–$133,000), apiece sold out;  Schenk also closed a deal on a Gerhard Richter painting that she did not bring to the fair, for €1.2 million ($1.8 million).

X-ist

  • Sold mixed-media-on-canvas works by Nuri Kuzucan in the €2,000–20,000 ($3,000–30,000) range.

Beck & Eggeling

  • Found buyers for small bronze pieces by Italian artist Gehard Demitz for €5,000 ($7,400) apiece.

Jacob Karpio

  • Sold four works by Luis Barba at $48,000 apiece.

Rain and Exhaustion Keep Scope from Soaring at Basel (Artinfo)

Scenes from the Jo'burg Art Fair

April 8, 2009 by Marion Maneker

Artinfo.com‘s reporter on the ground at the Johannesburg Art Fair saw these vignettes:

One conversation, overheard on the April 2 opening night, came to define the restrained buying mood. “It has to stop now,” a business executive from SASOL, the South African petrochemical conglomerate, instructed his company’s art buyer in Afrikaans. It was unacceptable for executives laying off staff and forfeiting bonuses to see new art acquisitions flaunted at their workplace, he said.

While buying wasn’t entirely muted — London’s October Gallery sold (by telephone) a large-scale aluminum-and-copper-wire-textile drapery by Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui for $650,000 to a royal buyer from Abu Dhabi — many of the 26 participating galleries reported sluggish sales.

And here’s another vivid tale:

For first-time exhibitor Henri Vergon, [ . . . ] business was “extremely slow.” By Saturday afternoon, the second full day of trading, the South African dealer’s only major sale had been a work by Mozambican sculptor Gonçalo Mabunda, a metal chair made from recycled weapons, priced at $12,000.

“All the sales I made here were to overseas buyers,” said Vergon, who earlier in the day had asked a South African visitor to leave his booth after he made a racist remark about Mabunda’s work and its pricing. “It is disappointing to see how South Africans are reluctant to even look at African art,” Vergon added. In recent years, Mabunda’s chairs have found increased favor, including in the design world.

Joburg Art Fair Sees Sophomore Slump (ArtInfo)

The Banksy Backlash

April 7, 2009 by Marion Maneker

The Times of London reports on the revolt against Banksy that’s been brewing among the graffiti artists and radicals Banksy purports to represent. Someone even defaced one of Banksy’s better known works known as Mild, Mild West:

banksy_vandalizedWhen he first began redecorating walls and buildings in his native city of Bristol in the early 1990s, the graffiti artist known as Banksy was frequently accused of vandalising private property.

A decade and a half later, having won fame and a considerable fortune, he faces a different charge. The graffiti artist – who fiercely defends his anonymity – now stands accused of causing gentrification. His street art is being held responsible for proposed regeneration projects; his aerosol paintings are blamed for raising house prices in formerly deprived neighbourhoods.

The Australian picks up the story and offers a few auction prices to illustrate how far up . . . and down the artist has traveled in the past few years:

Only two years after an acrylic and spraypaint work on canvas called Bombing Middle England fetched £102,000 ($212,000) at auction at Sotheby’s, and a year after a wall mural sold for £208,100 on eBay, Banksy is now being accused of betraying his core audience, England’s working class. [ . . . ] Banksy’s collectability may be diminishing. When Bombing Middle England sold for £102,000 in 2007, it exceeded expectations by more than £50,000. Last October, Turf War, a portrait of Winston Churchill with a mohawk, sold at Bonham’s for £60,000, which was £20,000 below the auctioneer’s expectation.

Banksy Backlash as Acclaimed Work Defaced (Times of London)

Banksy Less Bankable (The Australian)

Jo'burg Art Fair in One Stop

April 6, 2009 by Marion Maneker

South Africa’s Mail and Guardian offers a valuable one-stop landing page for all of their stories about this year’s Johannesburg Art Fair. With an estimate of at least 10,000 attendees–up from the previous year’s 6,000–the fair is drawing a lot of traffic. According to Ross Douglas, creator of the fair, this is one reason:

Not one of the world’s 300-odd art fairs focuses on contemporary art from Africa. Our intention with the first fair was to fill this gap. It’s not that easy. Without gallerists managing and promoting art, artists don’t find the market they need to sustain their careers. As with so much talent from the continent, Europe and the United States provided the opportunities for African greats such as Owusu-Ankomah, El Anatsui and, more recently, Romuald Hazoume to exhibit. Our solution last year was to commission Simon Njami, who captured the world’s imagination with his Africa Remix show and to a lesser extent the Africa Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale. He chose work mainly from younger artists starting to break into the international art scene. Njami’s selection of work, entitled As You Like It, attracted interest but did not sell. By contrast, local galleries sold beyond our expectations. Between R25-million and R30-million passed hands, giving the local contemporary art market a major cash injection.Continue Reading

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