Judd Tully was prowling the Frieze fellow traveller, Pavilion of Art & Design, for ArtInfo:

“In today’s market you have to make sure to offer something of great quality at a good price,” said Loic Le Gaillard, partner in London’s carpentersworkshop gallery. “Up to £20,000 it flies, at higher prices it becomes a bit more complicated and understandingly so.”

• Carpentersworkshop gallery scored a big hit with Fernandoand Humberto Campana‘s new “Sushi Buffet,” specifically made for the fair in brushed stainless steel and recycled rubber flip-flops sourced from Brazilian favelas. Six of the eight multicolored buffets from the edition sold at £54,000 ($84,600) each.
• Two less expensive editions by Atelier van Lieshout also found multiple buyers. “Friends,” a hellish jail cell with a tiny light fixture, ghoulishly populated by a hung figure, another fellow on the toilet, and a third seated on the floor, sold at £11,000 ($17,230) apiece from an edition of eight. “Lawyer,” a welded-steel desk lamp also from 2011, sold to at least three buyers at £4,500 ($7,000) each from an edition of 20.

• Dickinson: Helo Oiticica‘s “Metaesquema No. 191,” a small but stunning geometric gouache on cardboard from 1958, for a sum near the $300,000 asking price. The gallery also sold Lucio Fontana‘s fire-engine-red slashed abstraction, “Concetto Spaziale Attese” from 1966, for a price in the region of €3 million ($4.7 million). A postcard-sizedPeter Doig painting, “Untitled” from 2000, featuring a bearded figure in a red canoe, also fetched a price in the region of £65,000 ($102,000).

• Eykyn Maclean: Henry Moore‘s 7½-inch-ceramic “Madonna and Child” from 1943. It was originally in the collection of Kenneth Clark, the luminary art historian and museum director […] about $300,000

• Robin Katz Fine Art: Patrick Caulfield‘s […] oil-on-cardboard “Concrete Villa, Bruun” from 1963 to a young British collector […] in the range of the £450,000 ($705,000) asking price.

• New York’s Todd Merrill Studio Contemporary: Katsuyo Aoki‘s “Predictive Dream XXVII” from 2010, in cast porcelain with white glaze, […]  to New York collectors Brett Gorvy and Amy Gold for approximately $18,000.

• Mitchell-Innes & Nash: two large scale Roy Lichtenstein mixed-media collage works from 1990-96 for sums in the range of the $600,000 asking price.

• Galerie Vedovi of Brussels and Paris: Italian Zero Group artist Agostino Bonalumi […] seven works sold at prices ranging from €50,000 to €115,000 ($80,000 to $180,000), according to the gallery, including “Untitled Bianco” from 2011 that sold for €73,000 ($114,000).

Reuters reports a few sales:

• Van de Weghe Fine Art gallery sold an Alexander Calder for $1.5 million
• Sladmore Gallery raised 500,000 pounds for a cast bronze by Rodin.

The Master, Judd Tully, is scouting sales at the Mayfair super fair held in advance of Frieze. Here are his sales recorded on ArtInfo.com:

• Mayor Gallery: a small early Alexander Calder tabletop mobile from the 1960s in the six-figure pounds range, as well as a stunning suite of four Outsider art pieces — done with ball point pen and colored pencils — by the late Chicagoan Joseph Yoakum in the five-figure range.
• Van de Weghe Fine Art and Galerie Vedovi of Brussels: a beautiful ten-unit, galvanized steel-and-blue-Plexiglass work by Donald Judd, entitled “Stack” (1980), which went for $2.6 million & Agostino Bonalumi, “Untitled (Bianco)” (2010), for €34,000 ($47,340)Continue Reading

Georgina Adam reports on the evolution of the Pavilion of Art and Design, the fair held in a small tent in Berkeley Square in the heart of Mayfair that is limited to 50 galleries, as it has morphed into a big-ticket alternative to Frieze:

They spotted a gap in the market during the autumn London season, and filled it with the modern art and design that no other event caters for. “PAD is calm, elegant and attracts a different public than Frieze,” says exhibitor Peter Osborne of Osborne Samuel. Others don’t hesitate to describe the fair as “grown up” in comparison with what Tim Jeffries of Hamilton Gallery calls the “grazing herds” that flock to the Regent’s Park event. Ben Brown, participating for the second time, says the size and location of the fair are ideal. “My clients love it,” he says. “It’s in the centre of town; they can walk to it, and get around it in an hour. And all the contemporary collectors attending Frieze come to PAD as well.” […] Some major names are joining the fair this year, among them Gmurzynska from Zurich, Thomas Gibson and Simon Dickinson from London, the latter bringing Fernand Léger’s “Nature Morte” (1938).Continue Reading