Displaying items by tag: Art Market

Art Moscow, Russia’s longest-running contemporary art fair, has been canceled this year because of international tensions and a virtually nonexistent local market, its founder and organizer, Vasily Bychkov, has announced in an interview with "The Art Newspaper Russia."

He had already warned in August that sanctions were prompting foreign participants to pull out of other exhibitions organized by his company, Expo-Park, according to "The Art Newspaper Russia."

Phillips is planning to open a saleroom in Hong Kong “as soon as possible”, says Edward Dolman, who joined the auction house as its chairman and chief executive in July. Dolman, who worked at Christie’s for 27 years where he launched salerooms in Paris, New York and Hong Kong, says he has spent “a lot of time” over the past ten years developing the auction business and recruiting in Hong Kong. “It’s a very exciting market,” he says.

Christie’s announced the sale of Donald Judd’s "Untitled (Bernstein 93-1)" as one of the highlights of the fall auction season. The fifteen foot high sculpture will be included in the Evening Sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art on Wednesday, November 12th. In scale, design, radiance, effect and simplicity, "Untitled (Bernstein 93-1)" is one of the most important works by the artist to be presented on the market and confirms Donald Judd's position as a master of Minimalist art. "Untitled (Bernstein 93-1)" was executed a few months before the artist’s death; this magnificent sculpture, one of the artists large scale stack sculptures, has remained in the same collection since its creation in 1993.

Donald Judd's "Untitled (Bernstein 93-1)," is an icon of 20th century sculpture, and one of the artists most important and recognizable works. Judd's approach to sculpture was truly revolutionary, using industrial materials and pared-down geometric forms that equally stressed the physical structure and the space around it.

The U.S. has returned nine stolen 18th-century paintings by Mexican artist Miguel Cabrera to the government of Peru.

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara says the works were stolen from a church in Lima in 2008. He says they were smuggled out of Peru to be trafficked on the international art market.

Sotheby’s auction house is betting big on the latest global art market boom with financial filings showing the house is increasing its borrowing from corporate lenders in order to extend more guarantees to potential consigners. According to an 8-K filing made with the SEC on August 25, Sotheby’s is upping the commitments from lender GE Capital to $850 million from $600 million.

Among the goals listed for the increased borrowing are raising “the maximum permissible amount of net outstanding auction guarantees (.i.e auction guarantees less the impact of related risk and reward sharing arrangements) from $300 million to $600 million.”

The lineup of scheduled “Dialogues” for this year’s edition of EXPO Chicago, which runs September 18–21 at Navy Pier, touches on virtually every corner of the art market, from grant-making at charitable foundations and the changing nature of collecting, to the history and importance of performance art, photography, and public art.

First up on the schedule for Friday September 19, is a conversation between Elizabeth Smith, the executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation, and Christy MacLear, executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. They will discuss their respective foundations’ initiatives, including grant-making activities and legacy programs.

Conceived as a challenge to long-standing conventional wisdom, "Creating the Future: Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s" (on-sale September 9th, 2014) examines the premise that the progress of art in Los Angeles ceased during the 1970s—after the decline of the Ferus Gallery, the scattering of its stable of artists (Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses, Ed Rusha and others), and the economic struggles throughout the decade—and didn’t resume until sometime around 1984 when Mark Tansey, Alison Saar, Judy Fiskin, Carrie Mae Weems, David Salle, Manuel Ocampo, among others, became stars in an exploding art market. However, this is far from the reality of the L.A. art scene in the 1970s.

The passing of those fashionable 1960s-era icons, in fact, enabled the development of a chaotic array of outlandish and independent voices, marginalized communities, and energetic, sometimes bizarre visions that thrived during the stagnant 1970s. Fallon’s narrative describes and celebrates, through twelve thematically arranged chapters, the wide range of intriguing artists and the world they created.

New industry figures have revealed that the international art market has grown by 17% to $7 billion in the first six months of 2014. The French company Artprice stated that art sold at the major auction houses have totalled $7.15 billion ($5.22 billion euros). This has increased from the $6.11 billion figures crunched in the first half of 2013.

Thierry Ehrmann, from Artprice stated, "We have gone from 500,000 collectors in the post-war period to nearly 70 million 'art consumers' art lovers and collectors -- worldwide," he added; 2013 was a record year for art with sales worth $12.17 billion following a drop in 2012 linked to a contraction in the Chinese market. Ehrmann said museums and art centres, both public and private, were springing up all over the world, in particular in the Asia Pacific region and to a lesser extent in South America and the Middle East.

Art Basel Asia Director Magnus Renfrew will join Bonhams as deputy chairman Asia and director of Fine Arts in September, he said by telephone today.

“This is a very exciting time to be involved in the Asian art market and building up an Asian collector base,” said Renfrew, 38, who will be responsible for boosting Bonhams’ classical, modern and contemporary Asian art offerings.

Renfrew oversaw Art Basel’s Hong Kong fairs in 2013 and 2014. The company, which runs international art fairs in Basel, Miami and Hong Kong, said it has not appointed his successor in an e-mail response.

The art market is still crackling. Christie's International PLC said Tuesday it sold $4.5 billion of fine and decorative art during the first half of the year, up 22% from the same period a year ago—and representing a record high for the privately held company based in London. Christie's total included $3.6 billion in auction sales and $828 million in privately brokered art sales. Its private sales were up 16% compared with the first half of 2013.

Rival Sotheby's said it auctioned $3.3 billion in art during the first half, up 29.4% from the year before. The New York-based auctioneer will release consolidated totals next month.