Art Market Monitor

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Barceló & Stingel Lead Phillips London Sale

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Miquel Barceló, Muletero (2.5-3.5m)

Phillips announces the lead lots for its London sales cycle. This Miquel Barcelo bullfighter and three Rudolf Stingel works top the £15m Evening sale. The Barcelo is estimated at £2.5-3.5m, the same as the Stingel, Plan B work.

Phillips 20th Century & Contemporary Art auctions will bring together a selection of celebrated international names. The Evening Sale includes paintings by Josef Albers, Frank Auerbach, Wade Guyton and Christopher Wool; important artworks by Japanese artists Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama; and pieces by renowned Italian Futurists Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini. Comprising 30 lots, the 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale will take place on 8 March and is estimated to realise in excess of £15 million. The 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale on 10 March features 180 lots and is estimated to total in the region of £6 million.

Biggest Barceló Bullfight Comes to Christie’s Frieze Sale

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Francis Outred is testing the Barceló market for Bullfight paintings again in October’s Post-War and Contemporary Sale. This work is said to be the largest ever to come to the market but the auction house has put a cautious estimate on the work well below the £3.9m record price for a Bullfight work that sparked an intensive period of sales for the painter’s work:

By far the largest painting of the Bullfight series ever seen at auction, Areneros y muleros by Miquel Barceló (B. 1957) announces the grand finale of the corrida (102⅜ x 81⅛in. / 260 x 206cm.; executed in 1990; estimate: £2,000,000-3,000,000; illustrated right). In this work, the texture of the arena is referenced by the central surface of the canvas, which has been obtained by mixing sand into paint. Here, Barceló focuses directly on the ballet of the bullfight as a metaphor for painting itself, as we see the marks left by the duel between bullfighter and bull in the sand directly replicating those left by a painter on canvas. In fact the bullfighter has left the ring, but here we see the bull being carried by a procession of ‘Muleros’ out of the thickly carved exit in the bottom left hand corner, a trail of blood soaks the sand in its wake.

Barceló in Africa Recorded on Film

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There’s been a freight train of demand for Miquel Barceló’s work on the auction market. The New York Times reviews a pair of films dealing with Mali and revealing Barceló’s life there:

Mr. Barceló first started working in landlocked Mali in the 1980s and has since spent several months a year there, with the rest of his time split mostly between his native island of Majorca and a studio in Paris. While living in a Dogon village without electricity and running water, he has been learning and adapting many of the ancestral techniques used by the Dogon people in their own art, particularly involving clay. […]

The documentary, called “El Cuaderno de Barro” (The Clay Diaries), conveys the rapport that Mr. Barceló has developed with the local people, and the extent to which their artistry and storytelling traditions have influenced his work.

In the opening scene, Mr. Barceló is seen sharing a simple dinner with some of his Dogon friends, joking and arguing with them about whether fishermen used to catch dolphins in the Niger River that crosses Mali. […]

In the documentary, meanwhile, Mr. Barceló himself explains how he shifted his artistic focus and embraced clay, partly because painting proved too challenging in windy desert conditions and also because “for me, everything is an extension of painting.” While “using the Dogon techniques of 5,000 years ago,” Mr. Barceló discovered that “fresh clay keeps a memory,” also exploring the extent to which, working with clay, “you can re-do it all the time.”

Miquel Barceló’s African Adventure (New York Times)

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