Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis
Kenny Schachter, who is no stranger to the Stingel market, was paying attention last week when three major Rudolf Stingel pieces and six other works made $28m. If you’re an AMMpro subscriber, you’ll know already the significance of that number. (Here’s a hint: last week, more money was spent on Stingel than in all of 2016, his second highest dollar volume year.)
Here Schachter is talking about the Zadig & Voltaire collection which mostly underperformed:Continue Reading
This analysis of Rudolf Stingel's auction market—using auction data provided by Athena Art Finance—is available to AMMpro subscribers. Monthly subscriptions begin with the first month free.
Next week is going to be a big test of the market for Rudolf Stingel's work. Christie's has five works by the artist with a combined low estimate of $15.7m; Sotheby's has four works with an aggregate low estimate of $5.4m; and Phillips has a $2m gold carpet work in the Evening sale. Sotheby's and Christie's both have works from the same series as the record price paid at auction for a Stingel, the copper-plate versions of the Celotex works created during the artist's seminal 2007 Whitney show. These works, Sotheby's six panel version is above, are particularly market friendly as they combine the artist's ideas about authorship with a sturdy medium and the gold tone that has come to be associated with some of his most valued works.
Either this large six-panel piece or Christie's four-panel piece from the Zadig & Voltaire collection could easily top the $4.7m top price paid for another four panel piece (and for a instruction painting from 1993) two years ago in the same May sale cycle. Yet both works are dwarfed by the appearance of a massive self portrait of the artist that was also featured in that 2007 Whitney show. Priced at $10-15m, the 11-ft high work is one of four similar works. Two of those are now in the collections of the museums that showed his mid-career retrospective in 2007.
Since Christie's has a third-party guarantee on the work, it's safe to assume that not only will a new record be established next week but, also, that the week's total sales could equal or exceed all of 2016's sales.
With that in mind, let's look back at the last ten years of Stingel's auction sales as his market rose from $330k in sales in 2006 to more than $30m in 2015, paying careful attention to the bidding intensity as well as the price action.
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As part of its May 2017 Contemporary art sales, Sotheby’s has announced a large, six-panel work by Rudolf Stingel that is priced to set a record for the artist (though by the time it is auctioned there is likely to be a new record for the artist from the massive self-portrait expected to sell at Christie’s.) Two years ago, Phillips tied the record for the artist with the sale of a four-panel version of a similar work from the series for $4.75m.
Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled is an exceptional paradigm of the artist’s electroplated copper reliefs. The 2012 work, estimated to fetch $5/7 million, is particularly rare in its monumental configuration of six joined panels, measuring 94 1/2 by 141 3/4 by 1 1/2 inches overall.
