Contemporary
Sales: the naked truth
Anine-foot painting of a woman’s back by British artist Jenny Saville (pictured), which sold in 2009 for £434,000, will see a return of more than 1,000 per cent as it is guaranteed to fetch at least £5million at Sotheby’s next month. Even so, while such individual gains will
continue to be made, the market for contemporary art, usually the most buoyant sector of the art market, may be experiencing a cool down.
Estimates of between £208million and £305million for London’s major contemporary art sales next month are 23.4 per cent down on comparable figures in 2018 and 25 per cent down on 2017. A report by Arttactic, the market tracker, reveals that 70 per cent of participants believe contemporary art will either remain static or decline over the course of this year.
Exhibitions for Franz West, the Austrian artist, are being staged almost simultaneously at Tate Modern, the David Zwirner gallery in London and the Gagosian gallery in Rome, reminding us of a five-year struggle over the artist’s estate following his death in 2012.
A free spirit who disobeyed most of the rules (if someone said a work was beautiful then he would destroy it), West was represented by Zwirner in the US until 2001 when he shifted allegiance to Gagosian.
After he died, there was a dispute
about whether the artist’s estate, worth millions of dollars, would be handled by the non-profit Franz West Archive, which looked after his wife and young children’s interests, or the Franz West Foundation, which represented his galleries’ interests.
In 2015, the two clashed over the sale of “unauthorised” posthumous castings of West’s furniture by Gagosian, in a lawsuit that cast a shadow of uncertainty over the Franz West market. After West’s widow died in 2016, there was further confusion about who represented his estate and judged a work authentic.
Then, last year, Zwirner himself announced that he would be
representing the estate, while Gagosian continued to represent the Franz West Foundation – an amicable agreement (one hopes) between two of the most powerful galleries in the world, restoring confidence to the market.
Within the past two years, prices for West’s larger resin and papier-mâché sculptures (pink seems to be the favoured colour) have been selling at auction for more than $800,000 (£620,000). Privately, they can sell for more, says Inigo Philbrick, the dealer, who has works priced between $15,000 for lamps made in editions during the artist’s lifetime, to $1.5million for a large sculpture.