The optimistic hustle and bustle emanating from the Frieze fairs was also noticeable in the evening auctions with contemporaries at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips. Although Great Britain remains a high incidence area, a notable audience for the first time was there again. The auctioneers' appearance has become an exciting juggling act: they not only have to keep an eye on the audience in the hall, the specialists on site and the online bids, but also continue to take bids from the telephone benches in Hong Kong and New York. At Phillips, collectors from 46 countries participated - and London was able to prove its position as an international trading center for young art.
In terms of sales, rivals Christie's and Sotheby's were neck and neck: Sotheby's had sales of £ 65.9 million in its Contemporary Art Evening Auction with 36 lots (of 42 on offer).
Two years ago sales were 54.7 million.
40 percent of the works came from European collections.
Christie's “20th / 21st Century: Evening Sale”, combined with the “Thinking Italian” section, grossed 64.56 million.
Two years ago, this combined auction fetched 89 million.
Christie's brokered 36 of 40 lots.
35 percent of the buyers came from the Asia-Pacific region, 20 percent from America.
Phillips' total revenue was 25.2 million, roughly the same as in 2019. 40 lots out of 43 on offer were sold, with 93 percent the best sales rate.
Bidding battles costing millions
Asian collectors helped young painters of African descent to set records. But the sometimes extremely high auction prices for artists who have barely left the art college and works that are almost fresh from the studio also cause discomfort. There was a particular struggle for the work of the British women Flora Yukhnovich and Jadé Fadojutimi as well as the American Issy Wood, who lives in London. Yukhnovich's almost completely abstract paintings are inspired by Rococo painting and are reminiscent of Cecily Brown in the brushwork.
At Sotheby's, the hammer fell for Yukhnovich's 220 centimeter wide canvas “I'll Have What She's Having” (60,000 / 80,000), painted in 2020, at 1.85 million pounds. It was only in June that Phillips set the record of $ 1.2 million (with premium) for a similarly large work by Yukhnovich in a daily auction in New York. Sotheby's tax therefore seemed excessively low.
Issy Wood presented the entire stand of the Carlos / Ishikawa gallery in London at Frieze.
At Phillips, her oil painting on velvet "Eggplant / car interior" (100,000 / 150,000) rose to £ 260,000 in 2019 - a new record.
The highest mark for Jadé Fadojutimi was exceeded three times.
At Phillips, an online bidder from South Korea approved £ 950,000 for her painting “Myths of Pleasure” (80,000 / 120,000) from 2017, the year she graduated from the Royal College of Art. In the previous 24 hours, Sotheby's had already set her record twice in the evening. and the daily auction broken.
Fadojutimi is the youngest artist in the Tate Museum's collection and will have her first museum exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami from November onwards.
Love in the bucket
There were other records at Phillips for Serge Attukwei Clottey with “Fashion Icons” (30,000 / 40,000), selected by the London rapper Kano as a guest curator and sold for 270,000 pounds, as well as Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Sanya Kantarovsky, Shara Hughes and André Butzer. 82 percent of the lots at Phillips had never been called up at an auction. The top lot, Sigmar Polke's “Negerplastik” (2/3 million) from his series of images, created in 1968, was brokered for 2.5 million.
Banksy's “Love is in the Bin” also dominated the headlines at Sotheby's.
When it unexpectedly shredded half of itself three years ago in the same auction room through a hidden mechanism, it gained worldwide fame.
The European private collector who has now returned it paid a premium of one million pounds;
the expectation was now four to six million.
Only with the record bid of 16 million pounds could a telephone bidder registered in Asia prevail.
With fees, there are 18.6 million.
Young and digital customers
The largest of the three abstract paintings by Gerhard Richter, fresh from the market at Sotheby's from the Helga and Walther Lauffs collection and titled “SD” (7/9 million), sold for 8.2 million. Paula Rego's “Good Dog” (800,000 / 1.2 million) fell at 970,000 pounds, and Etel Adnan's abstract composition “Untitled” (60,000 / 80,000) rose to 280,000 pounds, more than twice its previous record . A quarter of all registered customers were under 40 years old, three times as many online bidders had registered as two years ago.
Christie's evening auction took place in the early afternoon at 9 p.m. in Hong Kong. It all started with Cecily Brown's “There'll be Blue Birds” (500,000 / 700,000), donated by the artist to an environmental organization. It rose to 2.9 million. The top lot, Basquiat's “Because it Hurts the Lungs” (7/10 million), just missed its lower estimate with 6.95 million. Hurvin Anderson's market-fresh panorama of a swimming pool, "Audition" (1 / 1.5 million), from 1998 rose to the second most expensive work with 6.2 million.
David Hockney's “Guest House Garden” went down at the lower estimate of five million, and the shoe sole “Sous la chaussure” (1.5 / 2.5 million) by Domenico Gnoli, painted in 1967, fetched 1.8 million.
The next step will soon follow: Gnolis retrospective in the Fondazione Prada in Milan will open in a few days.