Christie's London sales hit £219 million as seven artists set world records

Christie’s 20th- and 21st-century evening auctions in London brought in £219 million, or $289.4 million, on 14 October 2026.

The highest price of the evening went to Wassily Kandinsky’s Das bunte Leben, which sold for £31,560,000.

Bridget Riley’s Streak 2 (1979) made £5,214,000, passing the artist’s previous auction record of £4.3 million, set at Christie’s in 2016.

Liubov Popova’s Painterly Architectonic (1918) sold for £7,640,000 against a low estimate of £1,800,000. It far exceeded her previous record of £1,700,500, set in 2007. Popova was a Russian Cubo-Futurist who died aged 35.

Seven artists set world auction records across the sales, including four women. Portia Zvavahera’s This is where I travelled (2020) set an artist record at $407,000. Hurvin Anderson’s Last House (2013) sold for $7.55 million, above its high estimate of $3.9 million.

The Peter Simon Collection Evening Sale made £107,508,800 / $142,341,651, making it the highest-value single-owner collection sold at Christie’s in London. Simon founded the British fashion retailers Monsoon and Accessorize.

Among the works offered was Piet Mondrian’s Composition III (Komposition No. XIII), 1920, appearing at auction for the first time. The painting had spent much of the past century on loan to German museums, including the Brandenburg State Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Applied Arts Cologne. It hammered at $28.4 million and reached $33.4 million with fees.

Joan Miró’s 1925 work Peinture made £8,560,000 on its auction debut. Mondrian’s Composition A, with Double Line and Yellow (1935) sold for £9,710,000. The record for a Bacon work from the same series is $52.2 million, paid for Figure in Movement (1976) at Christie’s New York in 2023.

Across both sales, 91 per cent of lots sold and 96 per cent of value was sold. The total was up 103 per cent on the previous year.