Art Market News in Brief!

[16.11.2012]

Art Market News in Brief!  

Every fortnight, Artprice provides a short round up of art market news.

Danh Vo receives the 2012 Hugo Boss Prize

On 1 November, the Guggenheim Foundation awarded the Hugo Boss prize to Danh VO, a young Danish-Vietnamese artist aged 37. Rewarding the “subtlety and sophistication of his work” (Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Guggenheim Museum), the prize carries a grant of $100,000 and an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 2013.
Danh Vo has clearly joined the ranks of artists to be followed closely: although he has not yet been the subject of a solo exhibition, his installations have received international exposure in recent years. We The People, a project aspiring to reconstitute the Statue of Liberty to scale, is partly visible at the Art Institute of Chicago and was also presented at the FIAC (Paris). The artist’s work was also visible in Japan at the Yokohama Triennial in 2011. The Museum of Modern Art in Paris will offer him an exhibition entitled Everything Must Go as of 31 May 2013.
Nevertheless, Danh Vo’s work has only recently appeared at auctions. His auction debut produced a promising result: Mamy Poko Pants Diapers (2011), an interpretation of the American flag made of paint and gold leaf on board, was hotly disputed to $27,000 on 7 March 2012 at Christie’s New York, quadrupling its high estimate.

Salvador Dali retrospective at the Centre Pompidou (CNAC)

From 21 November 2012 to 25 March 2013, the Centre National d’Art et de Culture (the Centre Georges-Pompidou) in Paris will be presenting a Salvador DALI retrospective in collaboration with the MoMA, the MNCARS (Madrid), the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation and the Salvador Dali Museum. These partnerships will enable the institution to present his iconic masterpieces such as The Persistence of Memory (on loan exceptionally from the MoMA).
In fact, the Master of Surrealism had a similar solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou more than thirty years ago (1979-1980). This year, the exhibition will focus on exposing the close links between the personality of the artist and his work, through his “strokes of genius and his excesses“. More than 200 works (paintings, sculptures and drawings) will be exhibited alongside photographs and other documentary extracts.
With nearly 19,000 lots sold through auctions, Salvador Dali has the status of an art auction stalwart. On 10 February 2011, His Portrait de Paul Eluard (1929), a small oil on board (33 x 25 cm), generated his best-ever result at $19m, more than doubling its high estimate at Sotheby’s London. That result briefly represented the best result for a Surrealist work until it was recently dethroned by Joan MIRO’s Peinture (Etoile Bleue) which fetched nearly $33m at Sotheby’s in London on 19 June 2012.

This 20 November 2012, Sotheby’s focuses on 19th century European painting

On 20 November in London, Sotheby’s will be orchestrating a sale dedicated to 19th century European painting with a number of major signatures on offer such as Joaquin Sorolla, Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta, Nils Von Dardel and Gustave Courbet.

The star lot of the sale is a painting by Joaquín SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, Pescadores valencianos, estimated at between £1m and £1.5m ($1.5m – $2.4m). Among the painter’s favorite subjects, his beach and fishing-at-sea scenes generate very good results. Pescadores. Barcas varadas, Valencia fetched more than £800,000 ($1.25m) last June at Christie’s in London.
The catalogue also contains a painting by another leading Spanish artist, Ignacio ZULOAGA Y ZABALETA. Estimated at between £500,000 and £700,000 ($800,000 – $1.1m), this portrait may well fetch a new record for the artist. Indeed it is high time that his 1995 record of $975,000 was beaten. A year ago (on 22 November 2011), Sotheby’s London got close to a new record by selling one of his nudes, Madame Souty Reclinada en Un Sofa (Madame Souty) for £600,000 (nearly $950,000).
Among the most prestigious lots there will also be a work by the Swedish artist Nils VON DARDEL, estimated at between £400,000 and £600,000 ($630,000 – $950,000). The artist has only crossed the $600,000 threshold twice at auction since 1989. However, one of those results set a superb new record: Vattenfallet fetched more than $3.2m last October at Bukowskis in Stockholm.
Lastly, a very beautiful landscape by Gustave COURBET will be on offer, estimated at between £200,000 and £300,000 ($310,000 – $475,000). In November 2011, his Neige, a virgin landscape with comparable dimensions (88 x 81 cm vs. 81 x 100 cm) sold for just over $420,000 at Sotheby’s New York.

Sotheby’s has a handsome program for the second half of November in London, as this sale will be followed by two superb sales of Russian Art on 26 and 27 November.