Following Christie’s dual-city sale staged in Shanghai and London on Tuesday, Sotheby’s followed with two auctions held of modern and contemporary art in the British capital that generated $297 million. Between the back-to-back sales, 66 out of a total 74 lots sold, yielding an 89 percent sell-through rate. That number is slightly less than a stellar figure, but the rate is about the same as one achieved at Christie’s sales last night.
Three works by René Magritte, David Hockney, and Marino Marini came with in-house guarantees, while another 16 pieces were secured with third-party backing. After several lots were withdrawn, the sale was expected to fetch an estimated hammer price of £170.4 million–£223.3 million (229 million–$300 million). The sale’s final sum of £221.4 million ($297.2 million) includes a premium. Records were set for market up-and-comers like Shara Hughes, Flora Yukhnovich, Hilary Pecis, and Robert Nava.
Sotheby’s auctioneer Oliver Barker took to the rostrum on Wednesday morning to kick off the event with the “Now” evening sale, which is dedicated to works made by artists in the last two decades. The format was inaugurated in the fall as a way to test the global demand for new talent.
A serene painting from Claude Monet’s waterlilies series, Nymphéas (1914), hammered at its high estimate for a price of £20 million ($27.9 million), going to a buyer on the phone with London-based specialist Simon Stock, who was manning the phones from Sotheby’s Asia desk. With premium, its final price was £23.2 million ($31.2 million).
In the “Now” evening sale, records fell for in-demand contemporary artists. Roughly half of the works in that sale attracted bidding from clients based across the Asia Pacific region.
Shara Hughes’s 2019 painting Naked Lady, an abstraction that contains forms resembling body parts, sold for £2 million ($2.7 million) after a 15-minute bidding spar that saw 10 bidders vying for the work. The result surpassed the artist’s previous record of $1.5 million paid for Inside Outside (2018) at Phillips last year. A 2020 canvas titled Warm, Wet ‘N’ Wild by Flora Yukhnovich, whose Rococo-inspired tableaux have attracted attention from speculators since her work debuted at auction last year, saw a bidding frenzy. The painting eventually sold for a final price of £2.7 million ($3.6 million), setting a new artist record. The result was more than 13 times the pre-sale high estimate of £214,200 ($285,000).
Though the momentum slowed by a modernism-focused portion that concluded the auctions, Sotheby’s still reaped the benefits of a move made midway through the pandemic to further capitalize on the demand for primary-market darlings during its evening sales. “We saw classic names rub shoulders with young debutants in a way that worked,” said James Sevier, Sotheby’s European head of contemporary art, in a statement, calling the London event’s format “a winning formula.”