Phillips Defies Brexit Gloom as Records Tumble in Its $32 Million Contemporary Art Sale in London

While yesterday’s single-owner sale of
predominantly British art at Christie’s felt fairly cozy,
Phillips’s sale this evening was the first of the week to engage
with more risky, international contemporary art—and it totaled a
healthy £25.8 million ($31.8 million).

And whereas both Sotheby’s and
Christie’s later this week have posted pre-sale estimates lower
than last year, Phillips’s £17.1 to £24.5 million ($21 milion to
$30.1 million) estimate was fractionally up, though the house did
have seven more lots. Phillips also had the highest level of
pre-sale guarantees, which would have helped consignment levels.
Over 60 percent of the value of its sale (or 20 out of the 43 lots)
had been guaranteed, all by third parties so as to not expose the
company to financial risk.

Top of the estimate list was American
superstar Mark Bradford, for whom Phillips had set a record £8.7
million ($12 million) in 2018 when it sold his
mural-sized Helter Skelter (2007) for tennis ace
John McEnroe. That painting is now in the Broad Museum’s
collection.

Hauser & Wirth is currently showing
Bradford’s new work in London and, within hours of the opening
of Frieze, had sold A Molded Pool of Stories
(2019) for $3.4 million, and another at their gallery
reportedly for $10 million. The Phillips work, Value
35 (2010), typically collaged like a disfigured billboard
poster, was smaller and guaranteed with a £1.5 million to £2
million estimate ($1.8 million to $2.5 million). Coming from a Los
Angeles collection (it was interesting how many works had been
shipped over from America in spite of the uncertain situation in
Britain), it was subject to a bid—or was it just a wave from the
doorway?—at £1.65 million ($2.1 million), at which point the
bidder/waiver vanished into thin air, leaving Phillips staff
scurrying from the saleroom but unable to retrieve the bid. Finally
it was knocked down satisfactorily enough to a genuine phone bidder
for £1.9 million ($2.4 million).

But there was no shortage of genuine
bids in the salesroom from the packed crowd, in town for the art
fairs and auctions.

The sole British artist in the top
estimate group was Peter Doig protégé Hurvin Anderson,
whose Beaver Lake from 1998, shown at his
graduation show from the Royal College of Art (probably somewhere
near £10,000 then), carried the highest-ever estimate for the
artist at £1.5 million to £2 million. Supported by a third party
guarantee, it didn’t need one as it rose to £2.2 million—not far
off the record.

The only other £1 million (plus
estimate) was for Thomas Schutte’s Maschine (1993), a
motorized whirligig of grotesque swathed figures that Phillips had
sold in 2015 for $1.8 million. This time around it failed to recoup
costs, selling on its low estimate for £1.2 million ($1.5
million).

But the top price of the sale came for
Alex Katz’s fetching portrait of his wife, Ada, Blue
Umbrella 1 (1972). Never at auction before, its bigger
pendent, Blue Umbrella No 2 of the same date,
was sold by Charles Saatchi in New York in 2001 for a then record
$660,000. Katz prices have crept up to $1.2 million in May this
year, but Blue Umbrella 1 had Katz’s highest
estimate yet, at £800,000 to £1.2 million ($900,000 to $1.5
million) and after bidding from several international telephones,
went for a new record £3.4 million ($4.2 million) to a phone manned
by Phillips’s client advisory director, Philae Knight.

Another old timer enjoying a market
boost, or rather a comeback, is 1960s Light and Space artist Mary
Corse. Recently aligned with Pace Gallery and shown by it in Hong
Kong, Corse’s 8-square-foot Untitled (White Inner Bond,
Bevelled Edge) (2008), composed of paint and glass
microspheres was a relatively recent example of her minimalist
journey into white light paintings and carried her highest estimate
yet of £150,000 to £250,000 ($185,000 to $310,000) following the
triple estimate $312,500 paid for a 1988 painting in Los Angeles
last year. But unfortunately it was withdrawn from the sale because
of condition issues, so we’ll have to wait a bit longer for that
record to break.

Several lots, apart from these, were
carrying the highest yet estimates for the artists, demonstrating
some pre-sale optimism by owners and auctioneers. For a market
supposedly preparing for a downturn, it was remarkable how many
there were.

Also carrying a record estimate was
Raoul De Keyser, who died in 2012. Another Zwirner artist, the
gallery had just sold three of his works in a special online Freeze
exhibition priced between $45,000 and $280,000. At Frieze Masters,
Zwirner has priced de Keyser’s work at up to $400,000–far above his
$162,500 auction record. At Phillips this evening his de Stijl
style painting, Kabinet (1989), was estimated at
£100,000 to £150,000 ($123,000 to $185,0000) with a new record in
mind, and duly performed, selling to Belgian collector Mark
Vanmoerkerke in the room for £162,500 ($199,940). A good result for
the seller, a good result for the buyer, and a good example of an
auction room interacting with the market immediately surrounding
it.

Not surprisingly, artists relatively
fresh to the auction market, with whom Phillips kicked off its
sale, were also looking at records. American artist Simone Leigh’s
previous record, $93,750, was set in an African American sale at
Swann’s this year, so Phillips reckoned it was time to push her
boat out with her highest estimate yet of £40,000 to £60,000
($49,000 to $74,000). Now in her early 50s, Leigh has been in the
spotlight since a solo show at the New Museum New York in 2016, the
Guggenheim in New York this year, and her inclusion in the current
Whitney Biennial. Like much of her work, Shower Cap
(2013) references African ceramic traditions and
sociopolitical themes, and attracted multiple bidders before
selling to a woman in the room for a record £175,000
($215,320).

A second African American artist to
hit the auction block, this one for the first time, was Nathaniel
Mary Quinn, whose slightly tortured, almost Bacon-esque portrait
collages have been promoted by Pace London in 2014 and currently by
Gagosian in LA. For his auction initiation Phillips had a 2015 work
suggesting a multi-dimensional personality wearing a dress and a
black-rimmed hat estimated at £40,000 to 60,000 ($49,000 to
$74,000), which proved vastly underestimated as it sold for
£212,500 ($261,000). Phillips’s chairman Ed Dolman said he thought
such works were being sold only a few years ago privately for under
£10,000 each.

A third is Derek Fordjour, an artist
in his 40s who is currently showing at Josh Lilley gallery in
London, and has clearly won admirers as a patterned mixed media
painting of a girl blowing a Green Horn, only his
fourth work at auction, tipped his previous $137,000 record, set
only last month in New York, to sell for a double estimate £137,500
($169,000).

Another name to keep an eye on is
37-year-old Russian-born Sanya Kontarovsky whose surreal narratives
were shown at Luhring Augustine this spring and whose prices are
creeping up. The £30,000 to £40,000 estimate for the slightly
cartoonish Lavender Arrest at Phillips this
evening was his highest yet, but it could have been way higher.
Sent for sale by a West Coast collector who had acquired it from
Marc Foxx in Los Angeles in 2015, it was subject to numerous bids
before selling for a record £150,000.

Among those thriving on their recent
bullish results at auction was Tschabalala Self, the subject of a
solo exhibition now with her London dealer, Pilar Corrias, whose
collaged oil and fabric figure of a woman performing a balancing
act on a strange, prehistoric animal quadrupled estimates to sell
for £275,000 ($338,000).

And, inevitably, there was KAWS. Some
40 examples of KAWS’s works ranging from $600 to $6 million are
being auctioned in London and Hong Kong this week, and Skarstedt is
launching the artist’s first exhibition in London (prices $450,000
for paintings; $850,000 for sculpture). Where will the bandwagon,
which peaked at an extraordinary $14.8 million in Hong Kong this
simmer, stop? Phillips tonight gave no indication of any let up as
a painting sold within estimate for £975,000 ($1.2 million), and a
9-foot wooden Mickey Mouse figure with a £800,000 to £1.2 million
estimate was underbid by Jose Mugrabi before selling on the high
estimate for £1.455 million ($1.8 million).

So what was happening tonight?

Coming into this sale, people were
aware that the total value of the work on sale during Frieze had
sunk by nearly 30 percent since last year, but had actual prices?
In some cases, they appeared to. An Anish Kapoor, bought in 2013
for £1.14 million ($1.7 million), was back with a £500,000 low
estimate and sold for £569,000 ($700,000). And a Joe Bradley
painting that cost $708,000 in 2017 was on the block with a
£300,000 ($370,000) low estimate and sold for £399,000
($491,000).

But the overall strength of interest
throughout the sale demonstrated that Phillips had hit the right
note for Freeze week with not too many high-value lots, which their
competitors were finding hard to attract, and tapping into the
energy of Freeze, which is essentially about discovering and
presenting the potential of younger talent in the mid to lower
price categories.

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