Displaying items by tag: Auction

For the fifth consecutive year, Christie’s has beaten the annual art sales record, clocking up £5.1 billion ($8.4 billion dollars) of sales during 2014, which is up 12 percent on 2013. The figure includes private (as opposed to public) sales of £916 million, and online only sales of £21.4 million. But the majority was for good old-fashioned public auction sales (up 10 per cent to £4.2 billion).

Of the many categories of sale Christie’s holds, the largest by far is for post-war and contemporary art, the driving engine of the auction market. Sales in this category at Christie’s rose by 33 per cent last year to £1.7 billion ($2.8 billion), accounting for an extraordinary 40.5 per cent of public auction sales.

Graduates of Goldsmiths, University of London who have become household names in contemporary art, including Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, Sarah Lucas, Yinka Shonibare and Michael Craig-Martin, are donating works to raise funds for a new art gallery at their old art school. Sam Taylor-Johnson, Julian Opie and Steve McQueen, whose "Twelve Years a Slave" won an Oscar last year, have also given pieces.

The works, including a spot painting and a swirl painting by Hirst, a bronze by Lucas, and one of Gormley’s cast iron standing men, are expected to raise most of the £2.8 million cost of the gallery at a Christie’s auction next month.

Sotheby's Paris has announced the sale of the Louis Grandchamp des Raux collection of French 17th- and 18th-century paintings, "Art Daily" reports. According to the auction house, this is the most significant collection of paintings from the period to hit the auction block in two decades.

The fifty piece-collection includes works from some of the era's most notable artists, including François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Desportes, Louyse Moillon, Anne Vallayer-Coster and Hubert Robert as well as works by more obscure names such as Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié and Pierre-Antoine Lemoine.

Having noticed the growing number of works created in the 1960s that have begun to dominate the Contemporary art sales, we asked the good people at Artnet to provide us with enough data to see better how 1960s works have come into their own. Artnet looked at the top 1000 works for each year between 2000 and 2014, then they gave us the works created in the 1960s that appeared on those lists. Karolina Prawdzik turned that data into these charts.

The chart above shows the share of the top 1000 works that were created in the 1960s. Remember that many of Contemporary art’s blue chip artists did their seminal work in the decade: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Mark Rothko, and Yves Klein.

The former owner of a disputed Caravaggio has lost his battle for compensation from an auction house. Lancelot William Thwaytes sold "The Cardsharps" at Sotheby's in 2006 for £46,000 after being told it was by a follower of the Old Master.

The new owner subsequently insured the painting for millions - after a close friend, an art expert, claimed it was in fact an original Caravaggio. Sotheby's maintains the painting is not by the artist.

Mr. Thwaytes attempted to sue Sotheby's of London, for giving him negligent advice after the new owner had the artwork valued at £10m. Lawyers for Mr. Thwaytes accused Sotheby's of not consulting enough top experts or sufficiently testing the painting before the 2006 sale.

Christie’s is to auction a unique selection of rare works on paper from the Triton Collection Foundation, spanning over three centuries of art history and representing the most important avant-garde movements of the 19th and 20th Century, including works by Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Gino Severini, Odilon Redon, André Derain and Salvador Dalí, many of the works on paper will be offered at auction for the first time. Forty nine of the works will be sold in the single owner evening sale Exceptional Works on Paper from the Triton Collection Foundation on March 25, 2015 in Paris during the Salon du Dessin. This will be followed by a further selection of works will be offered across auctions in Paris and London throughout 2015 and early 2016.

Sotheby’s London Impressionist and Modern Art Sale will feature “Les Peupliers à Giverny,’’ one of Monet’s depictions of poplar trees in the fields at the edge of his property in Giverny. Painted in 1887, it captures the sunset of early autumn. Sotheby’s is auctioning the painting on Feb. 3; it is estimated to sell for $13.8 million to $18.4 million (£9 million to £12.1 million).

The work is in fact one of five Monets included in this Sotheby’s sale, but this particular painting maybe of special interest due to the seller of the work – the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which comes as a surprising twist. The catalogue says it is being sold to “benefit the acquisitions fund.”

The Italian curator Francesco Bonami is organizing an auction of Italian art at Phillips New York on April 28. Around 50 works created over the past 100 years are due to go under the hammer, but Arte Povera, one of the best-known movements to come out of the country in the past century, will not take centre stage. Instead, Bonami will focus on less well-known artists, in a similar vein to the exhibition he organized at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2008, “Italics,” which shifted the focus from Arte Povera and Transavanguardia artists to those who had been side-lined by traditional readings of Modern and contemporary Italian art. “The idea is to open up the view of Italian art beyond the household names,” Bonami says.

On Wednesday, January 7, 2015, Christie’s announced that Ambra Medda will be the new Global Creative Director of the auction house’s 20/21 Design Department. Based in London, the department is dedicated to furniture, lighting, ceramics, and sculpture from the Art Nouveau, Arts & Crafts, Art Deco, Modernist, and Contemporary movements. The auction house holds 20/21 Design sales twice annually in New York (June and December), Paris (May and November), and London (April and October).

Medda, an accomplished curator, co-founded Design Miami alongside developer Craig Robbins in 2005 and served as the fair’s director for five years. With annual shows in Basel, Switzerland, and Miami, Design Miami has emerged as one of the world’s leading celebrations of design culture and commerce.