Artists of colour and women soar at Christie’s contemporary sale

WHILE the usual suspects continue to command the highest prices at auction — as evidenced by Monday (May 9) night’s US$195 million sale of Warhol’s Marilyn — the art market also continues to seize on the potential next hot thing.

On Tuesday, Christie’s turned its attention to some of those prospects at its 21st century contemporary evening sale — which totalled US$103 million, just shy of a high estimate of US$106 million. The auction of 31 works brought strong prices for works by Black artists like Amoako Boafo, Reggie Burrows Hodges and Ouattara Watts.

Also faring well were women — including Shara Hughes, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Elizabeth Peyton and Lisa Yuskavage — along with relative unknowns like 27-year-old painter Anna Weyant, whom the megadealer Larry Gagosian recently started representing (and dating). And Refik Anadol, a Turkish-American data artist, offered the evening’s only NFT (non-fungible token).

“We are defining what will be the next great generation of artists,” said Ana Maria Celis, a Christie’s specialist. “Ultimately the market will decide that.”

There is a limited supply of blue-chip works in the world and collectors — as well as auction houses — remain hungry for inventory. Because of that demand, artists’ typically long journey to the world stages of a Christie’s or Sotheby’s has increasingly been accelerated.

Just last year, for example, Hodges, a figurative painter, had his first New York solo show at the Karma gallery on the Lower East Side and only 8 months later set an auction record when one of his paintings, estimated at about US$40,000 to US$70,000, sold for more than US$600,000. At Christie’s on Tuesday, his Intersection of Color: Experience, which depicts a crowd of figures, sold for US$706,000, having been estimated at US$200,000 to US$300,000.

In part, art experts say, this has to do with collectors’ attention to artists of colour in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. “Everything shifted in 2020,” said Mashonda Tifrere, an art adviser. “Since December 2021, I’ve sold over maybe 60 works of emerging artists from Black and brown people to white collectors.”

Ouattara Watts, an artist from Ivory Coast, whose painting, Afro Beat, sold for US$781,000 on an estimate of US$100,000 to US$150,000, has been around for some time — he had a solo at Gagosian in 1995 — and now has a show at Karma Gallery.

“Now you’re discovering artists that should have been in conversation,” said Gardy St Fleur, an art adviser. “They’re finally getting their due.”

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Works by artists of colour soared over their estimates. Boafo’s Yellow Dress sold for US$819,000 on an estimate at US$250,000 to US$350,000; a work by Pakistan-born artist Salman Toor, Girl and Boy With Driver, sold for US$882,000, having been estimated at US$150,000 to US$200,000. A sombre Glenn Ligon from the artist’s Stranger series sold for US$1.6 million, over an estimate of US$600,000 to US$800,000.

A wide range of female artists also fared well. Weyant’s work, Summertime — featuring a prone young woman with bare skin — kicked off the evening at Christie’s Rockefeller Center showroom, selling to an unidentified buyer on the phone in Hong Kong for a staggering US$1.5 million on an estimate of US$200,000 to US$300,000 after 8 minutes of competition among 11 bidders. “What a way to start the sale,” said auctioneer Georgina Hilton.

A fantastical landscape by Hughes, who last year had a show at the Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, sold for US$2.9 million on an estimate of US$500,000 to US$700,000. And Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly) by Juszkiewicz, who explores gender and class in European painting, went for US$1.6 million, having been estimated at US$200,000 to US$300,000.

Sales of some of the more established artists were less buoyant. A deep red Gerhard Richter, the highest priced lot in the sale, sold for US$36.5 million, just over the estimate of more than US$35 million; Sigmar Polke tanked at US$819,000, below the low estimate of US$1.2 million.

Attesting to the mercurial nature of the art market — how an artist’s fortunes can droop — an abstract by Adrian Ghenie, recently all the rage at auction, sold for US$2.2 million, below the low estimate of US$2.5 million.

Two Basquiats, consigned by the same owner, were withdrawn from the sale — typically an indication that the reserve price would not be met. “It’s never an easy decision,” said Guillaume Cerutti, Christie’s chief executive. “We don’t want to sell at any price. We want to sell at a price that is relevant for the artwork and a price that the client wants.”

Anadol’s dynamic NFT, inspired by the facade of Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona, sold for US$1.4 million, having been estimated at US$1 million to US$2 million. (The artist installed his “living NFT” outside the Christie’s headquarters in advance of the sale.)

Despite the froth that seemed to surround some artists in Christie’s sale, art world observers say it is heartening to see artists of colour in the auction major leagues, commanding big prices.

“It’s great that a lot of these artists are being brought to light,” said Phyllis Hollis, the host of the podcast Cerebral Women Art Talks. “Auction is a way of solidifying the contributions of artists of colour to the canon. People are recognising the talent of underrepresented artists, and that’s promising.” NYTIMES