Willem de Kooning’s Untitled (1977) reached a European auction record for the artist at Sotheby’s New Bond Street in London, yet the wider sale finished below its low estimate. The painting hammered at £8.2m, at the lower end of its £8–12 million estimate, before selling for £9.8m with fees.
Sotheby’s held its Contemporary Evening Sale on 15 October. The auction ran for one hour, with 34 lots offered after works by Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer and Leon Kossoff were withdrawn before the sale. Ten lots carried guarantees.
The sale had been given an overall estimate of £41.7–58.6 million. It brought £36.9m at hammer, below its £41.7m low estimate.
Including fees, the total was £45.9m, slightly below last October’s £47.6m.
Advertisement
De Kooning’s result was also two and a half times the price the work achieved at Sotheby’s New York in 2015.
The strength of that single lot was set against thinner demand elsewhere. Works by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, estimated at £600,000 to £900,000, and by Jadé Fadojutimi, estimated at £350,000 to £450,000, went unsold.
Yayoi Kusama’s 2021 walled sculpture I Who Was Awestruck at the Shape of the Secret I Found in the Cosmos hammered at £250,000, a quarter of its £1m presale low estimate, and sold for £320,000 with fees.
Six of 34 lots went unsold, leaving an 82% sell-through rate. Only approximately 30% of lots hammered above their respective presale low estimate.
Works by Banksy, Georg Baselitz, Fadojutimi, Lucian Freud, Gerhard Richter and Yiadom-Boakye were among those that went unsold.
Richter’s 1992 Abstraktes Bild sold for £5.4m, or £6.7m with fees, slightly below its £6m presale low estimate. The work had previously sold for £3.6m in a 2011 Christie’s London sale.
Mark Rothko’s 1969 Untitled Colour Field painting sold to an online bidder for £3m, or £3.8m with fees, meeting its presale low estimate.
Thomas Stauffer, co-founder of Zurich-based Gerber & Stauffer Fine Arts and president of the Swiss Art Market Association, said: “Collectors are not willing to take big risks.”
Of the Kusama result, Stauffer said it was “more than a little scratch; that result does not go down well in auction database history.”
Advertisement
Comments (0)