Auction Blotter: Kenny Scharf Shatters Records, Elizabeth Peyton Drops the Mic, and More Highlights From New York’s Day Sales

Last week, right in the middle of Armory Week madness,
Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips held their spring contemporary
art auctions, adding to the glut of fresh work on the market. And
while these mid-season sales might not command the red-carpet
rollout of the New York evening auctions in May and November, they
still help predict who the next market darling will be and offer a
gut check on the state of the market for new art.

Combined, the three houses sold $64.2 million worth of
contemporary art last week, up just over 5 percent from last year’s
total. But enough about the overall numbers: Here are a few of the
specific highlights. (As usual, all prices include the buyer’s
premium unless otherwise noted.)

SCHARF SOARS

The collection of the late businessman Richard L. Weisman,
consigned to Christie’s last year, contains a number of important
works, including a series of athlete portraits he commissioned from
Andy Warhol. Last month, one such portrait of Muhammad Ali sold for $6.3 million in
London. But while that one was quite the ado—and it ended up
being the biggest price tag of the evening—few onlookers had high
expectations for a kitschy Kenny Scharf from Weisman’s collection,
a large acrylic and spray paint on canvas called LOVE
(1982) that depicts Fred Flintstone and his wife, Wilma Flintstone,
as squiggly snail creatures staring into each other’s eyes.
Estimated to sell for $30,000 to $50,000, the work was rocketed to
a final price of $525,000, more than twice Scharf’s previous
auction record (which, oddly, was for another Flintstone
painting).

HAUSER EFFECT

There are plenty of reasons to believe in the market power of
Simone Leigh, the sculptor who has in the past two years won the Hugo Boss
Prize, stole the show at the
Whitney Biennial, and installed a
larger-than-life work on New York’s High Line. But the most
obvious reason to go all in on Simone Leigh is the fact that she’s
now repped by the global powerhouse Hauser & Wirth, who poached the
artist from her New York gallery Luhring Augustine, as well as
David Kordanksy Gallery, which used to rep her in LA. (A show at
Kordansky scheduled for this month is going ahead as planned.) The
representation was announced in January, and last week, the first
work to come to auction since that news broke was on the block at
Sotheby’s. The porcelain and terra cotta sculpture was estimated to
sell for $80,000, but instead went for $337,500, a new record for
the artist. Notably, her top seven auction prices were all set
within the past year, and her top three are all from this series.
It seems fair to assume this is just the beginning for Leigh’s
market.

PARTY CRASHER

Some noticed that the work of painter Jonathan Gardner, with its
figuration deeply indebted to surrealism, bears more than a passing
similarity to that of market phenom Nicolas
Party. Not making any accusations here—just saying if you like
Party, you’ll probably like Gardner. And so when a 2014 painting was
slotted as lot one in Phillips’s New Now sale, many expected it to
ride the surrealist-figurative wave and crest above $100,000,
marking an impressive auction debut. And crest it did, more than
quadrupling the high estimate of $30,000 to make $125,000 with
fees. A few lots later, that number was topped by another artist:
none other than Nicolas Party. While the work on paper—which was
originally sold to benefit the Renaissance Society at the
University of Chicago—was only supposed to sell for $80,000, it
ended up finding a buyer for a ripe $237,500.

IS THIS IT?

Perhaps a very vigilant fan of New York City rock legends the
Strokes was bidding at Sotheby’s last week. We say this because
Elizabeth Peyton’s Julian (2004)—a portrait of the band’s
lead singer, Julian Casablancas—was estimated to sell for $40,000
and instead went for $193,750. It’s the latest in a string of
strong prices for works on paper by Peyton, who last year had an
acclaimed show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, where
her chic portraits of scruffy rockers and movie heartthrobs were
installed between the paintings of English nobility and kings. Her
record for the medium, set in November, is $300,000. That’s a major
shift from October 2018, when another Peyton work on paper of
Casablancas on stage, mid-croon, sold for just $57,006 at the
contemporary art day sale at Sotheby’s London. Seems like it’s time
to cue up “Last Night.”

FIGGIS FLIES

Two works by the Irish artist Genieve Figgis appeared in the
Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated sale last week, and they were both
first sold by Bill Powers, who runs the space Half Gallery. (The
name refers to the size of its original location, a small nook on
Forsyth Street, but now Half Gallery is a full-size space on E. 4th
Street, which opened last Saturday with a show of new work by Tanya
Merrill.) Both performed well, extending the streak that began when
a pair of her works in the Hong Kong sales in November sold for big
numbers—one just over $300,000, the other just over $200,000. Last
week, Figgis’s Piano Lesson (2014) fetched $100,000, while
Gang of Clowns (2016) sold for $87,500, both well
over their high estimates.

TRIBUTE TO TILTON

Two of the most anticipated lots in the New Now sale were placed
next to each other in the lineup: a painting by the late, great
Noah Davis, and a work by Jeff Sonhouse, who has been gripping the
auction world since his 16-part painting, Bubonic
Bling (2002) sold for $162,500 at Phillips last November.
The two were bonded by a common dealer: both were originally sold
by a gallery run by Jack Tilton, the trailblazing gallerist who
died in 2017. Last week, the work by Sonhouse on the block was much
smaller than the previous one—it is a diptych rather than a
16-panel piece—but it still sold for $162,500, the exact same
figure as his record. The painting by Noah Davis, meanwhile, saw
bidding spurred by his widely celebrated show this year at David
Zwirner’s Chelsea space, and it more than quadrupled the high
estimate of $80,000 to end up at $400,000.

CAN’T GET ENOUGH
CURTISS

The prices for Julie Curtiss seem to have slightly leveled off
in the first part of 2020; last month, a painting estimated to sell
for $156,617 at the Phillips New Now sale in London ended up going
within spitting distance of its estimate (a rarity for Curtiss) at
$179,457. Then at Christie’s New York last week, the Curtiss
painting Redfaced (2016), which features a character with
a long, witchy hand covering her face, sold for $162,500 on a high
estimate of $80,000. And while that’s a down-tick from the $423,000
achieved for a Curtiss painting at Christie’s in November, think
about this: the consignor of last week’s work bought it at a show
at Field Projects, where work was selling for just $1,350.

The post Auction Blotter: Kenny Scharf Shatters Records,
Elizabeth Peyton Drops the Mic, and More Highlights From New York’s
Day Sales appeared first on artnet News.