MARKET NEWS
It’s now eight and a half years since Damien Hirst risked alienating his dealers by staging a solo auction at Sotheby’s – Beautiful Inside my Head Forever. It was the same day as the collapse of Lehman Brothers but it appeared to outperform the financial markets, reaping an above estimate £111.4 million.
Following the credit crunch, prices for all the contemporary art superstars suffered – Jeff Koons and Richard Prince, for instance, as well as Hirst. But in the rebound, Hirst still has some ground to make up.
One way of measuring that is to look at the works that sold in Hirst’s 2008 auction and see how they do today. An example is coming up at
Phillips next week. Beautiful Mider Intense Cathartic Painting (with Extra Inner
Beauty) is a seven foot square spin painting with a skull at the centre, and carries an estimate of £350,000 to £450,000. In 2008 a photograph of it placed behind the auctioneer’s head came to symbolise the pizzazz of the auction. It had an estimate of £300,000 to £400,000 and sold for £668,450, reportedly to the Italian collector Gilda Moratti.
Last year, it was announced that Hirst had patched things up with his biggest dealer, Gagosian, and now his new work is to be exhibited by François Pinault at the Venice Biennale. Could his fortunes be about to turn again? More likely to take a big loss at the London sales is Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who owns several top lots coming up at Christie’s tonight. As a result of an ongoing legal dispute between the Russian and his art supplier, Yves Bouvier, head of the Geneva, Luxembourg and Singapore Freeports, it has been revealed how much Rybolovlev paid for them. Rybololev claims Bouvier sold him art at vastly inflated prices. At Christie’s tonight is a Gauguin he paid $85 million (£68 million) for, but is now estimated at £12 million pounds, and a Magritte for which he paid $43.5 million, but is now estimated at £6.5 million ($8 million).
Christie’s would not be drawn to comment on the provenance details and prices which have been reported by Bloomberg, but did emphasise that the auction estimates, in their view, were the right ones. London Fashion Week spent much time in art galleries this year – Tate especially. But the most impressive alignment of art and fashion took place at Burberry’s Makers House in Soho, where creative boss Christopher Bailey had packed the showroom with Henry Moore sculptures, drawings, found objects and workmen’s tools borrowed from the Henry Moore Foundation.
Bailey, a fellow Yorkshireman, has had a lifelong attachment to Moore and a special interest in his working process, forms and textures, which he echoed in some of his designs.
As a branding exercise for Burberry it made perfect sense. But will it bring new blood to the Moore market? There are several examples of his work on offer at auction this week, starting tonight at Christie’s with a small bronze of a Mother and Child on a Ladderback Chair, with a £500,000 estimate. CG