MARKET NEWS
Sotheby’s held its first Modern and Contemporary African art sale for 18 years in London last week, challenging the monopoly established by Bonhams in this area. To do so, it headhunted Bonhams’ specialist Hannah O’leary, who followed the Bonhams formula but took it a stage further, adding pieces by artists of African descent working in the diaspora who might normally be found in international contemporary art sales. Although select examples by stalwarts of the Bonhams sales – El Anatsui and Irma Stern in the £400,000-£700,000 range – were among the top-selling lots, several other examples of their work did not sell. The chief casualty was Jacob Pierneef, the colonial-period South African painter of unpopulated landscapes. However, this was balanced by new ingredients as records tumbled for 2004 Turner Prize nominee Yinka Shonibare (£224,750) and Pascale Marthine Tayou – on show recently at the Serpentine Gallery – at £52,500. British collector Charles Saatchi contributed to the £2.8 million proceeds by selling several works that were in his Pangaea, New Art from Africa and Latin America exhibition in 2015. Among these were a recordbreaking painting by Ivorian artist Armand Boua for £17,500, and a handful of works by artists who had never been sold at auction before, including Vincent Michea from Senegal and photographers Mikhael Subotzky from South Africa and Leonce Agbodjelou from Benin. Angolan collector Sindika Dokolo picked up several lots, paying record prices for Tayou’s textile work
Cache-sexe and Nicholas Hlobo’s suggestive ribbon-and-rubber weaving (£60,000). He also bought one of Saatchi’s paintings by Aboudia for £15,000.
Photography was hot in the New York sales last week. At Christie’s sale of the Emily and Jerry Spiegel Collection, a vintage 1936 photograph of a tearful woman by Man Ray quadrupled estimates to sell for a record $2.2million (£1.7million) to New York art advisers Ruth/ Catone. The Spiegels bought it at Sotheby’s in 1982 for about $4,000. Also from the Spiegel collection was a vintage 1970 print of Diane Arbus’s famous A
Jewish Giant at Home…, which Spiegel bought for nearly $7,000 in 1981. It sold for $583,500. In the contemporary arena, Uk-based German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans is currently the toast of the art world. Having achieved eminence while working with his London dealer, Maureen Paley, receiving the Turner prize in 2000, he reached an even greater collector audience through the David Zwirner gallery in New York, which has also represented him since 2014. He is now the subject of major exhibitions at Tate Modern and the prestigious Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland. At auction, prices for his large prints, which are unique apart from the artist’s copy, have been soaring. During Sotheby’s lower-value day sale an early example of a playful seated couple, which cost $50,000 18 months ago, more than doubled estimates to sell for $120,000. Zwirner sells recent large prints for around $200,000, but at Sotheby’s select evening sale, one of these, a sensual, 8ft-wide, abstract image from his
Freischwimmer series, made in the dark room without a camera, sold for $660,000.