798 District Blog

Christie’s, the world’s leading art business, announced that tonight’s sale of International Modern and Contemporary Art in Dubai made $14,043,000 / AED 51,565,896, more than doubling the pre-sale estimate of $6.7 million and confirming Christie’s market leadership in the region. The auction was 94% sold by value and 84% sold by lot. The buyer breakdown by lot was 60% from the Middle East, 28% from Europe, 10% from the Americas and 2% from Asia. The sale concludes a record year for Christie’s in contemporary Middle Eastern art, with an increase of 117 percent over 2009.

Jussi Pylkkänen, President of Christie’s Middle East and Europe, said: “A packed saleroom, a team of 20 Christie’s staff manning the telephones and internet bidding from around the world, helped to make tonight’s auction both successful and hugely memorable. The sale achieved $7.3 million over our pre-sale expectations and saw record numbers of clients registering to bid, with nearly 200 registrants from 23 countries. The 30 works from the Dr. Mohammed Said Farsi collection were again 100% sold and saw a huge increase in international interest in Egyptian art. We were delighted to see Mahmoud Said’s Whirling Dervishes sell for a world record $2,546,500 making it the most expensive Middle Eastern painting ever sold. Following the trend of the Frieze art sales in London two weeks ago, tonight’s auction here in Dubai had a tremendous spring in its step.”

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PITTSBURGH, PA.- Carnegie Museum of Art presents Ordinary Madness, an exhibition that mines the museum’s rich holdings of contemporary art to suggest an unsettling observation: that the ordinary is in fact laced with the contradictory, uncanny, and surreal.

On view are a wide array of works that engage the everyday from various vantage points, illuminating the bewildering experiences we subconsciously accept as part of our daily lives. At the heart of the exhibition are the strengths, quirks, and unique history that comprise the museum’s collection of contemporary art.

“Ordinary Madness came together from my desire to present a series of comparisons across media and art historical categories that would articulate how artists engage with everyday experience, and the way art can be used as a powerful tool to navigate a complex and disconcerting world,” said Dan Byers, curator of Ordinary Madness and associate curator of contemporary art at Carnegie Museum of Art.

Ordinary Madness revisits major works acquired from past Carnegie International exhibitions, and presents the opportunity to show a wide range of permanent collection works alongside recent acquisitions, creating juxtaposition and dialogue that otherwise might not be apparent. The exhibition takes place in the Heinz and Forum Galleries and includes a 16 mm film series in October and November in CMA Theater.

Ordinary Madness presents art from the museum’s contemporary art collection thematically as a way to explore connections and comparisons between different works. But overall, the exhibition examines how life is filled with the bizarre and unusual and how art reflects those observations.
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LONDON.- This evening, Sotheby’s Sales of 20th Century Italian Art and Contemporary Art, brought a combined total of £30.4 million/$48.8 million (Est. £22.3-30.5 million*) – substantially more than in the equivalent sales last year (£20 million).

Commenting on the 20th Century Italian Art Sale results, Claudia Dwek, Co Chairman Sotheby’s Italy, said: “We are delighted with the results of this evening’s sale. The auction achieved the above-estimate sum of £17 million representing the highest ever total for a sale in this field staged by Sotheby’s. While the majority of lots were acquired by Italian collectors, the sale saw activity from clients across the globe, including from the Far East. These strong results and healthy sell-through rates testify to Sotheby’s leadership in this field.”

Discussing today’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale, Alex Branczik, Director, Contemporary Art, Sotheby’s, said: “The Frieze Art Fair and the London Art Scene brought the whole collecting community here this week. With this sale, our vision was to showcase, alongside the more established names, the most interesting works by new and cutting-edge artists to satisfy the desires of collectors in this field in London during Frieze week. The energy generated in the sale room for the first two lots of the sale – by Ged Quinn and Ahmed Alsoudani – validated our strategy.”
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LONDON.- The Frieze Art Fair has now opened to the public and features 173 of the world’s most exciting contemporary art galleries.

Visitors can also take part in Frieze Projects, the fair’s unique programme of artist commissions, which this year features nine new works that all explore ideas of performativity. Frieze Film is being shown in a specially constructed cinema outside the fair’s entrance and is free to the public.

Frieze Art Fair Stand Prize Winner
The Frieze Art Fair Stand Prize sponsored by Champagne Pommery has been awarded to Sadie Coles.

The judges agreed unanimously that Sadie Coles stand articulated a long-term commitment to and understanding of the artists represented. Sadie Coles’ booth can be found at Frieze Art Fair stand C15 and features work by Sarah Lucas, Elizabeth Peyton and Ugo Rondinone.

The Frieze Art Fair Stand Prize was judged by Beatrix Ruf, Stuart Comer and Jerry Saltz.
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LONDON— Just inside the entrance to the eighth edition of the Frieze Art Fair, London’s largest commercial event devoted to contemporary art, the Copenhagen gallery Nicolai Wallner has installed a new life-size sculpture by artist duo Elmgreen and Dragset of a boy standing tentatively at the end of a diving board, looking fearful of taking the jump. The piece, called “Catch Me Should I Fall,” and priced at a cool €140,000 ($195,000), hardly captures the mood at this year’s fair, where VIP collectors did not seem at all scared to take the plunge.

Storming the gate at the 11 a.m. opening bell were California’s Norah and Norman Stone, New York’s Susan and Michael Hort, London’s own Anita and Poju Zabludowicz, the London-based Russian Dasha Zhukova, Chicago’s Stefan Edlis, and even the elusive Connecticut hedge-fund honcho Steve Cohen, who by most accounts has never made an appearance at Frieze. Just underneath Elmgreen and Dragset’s diving board, a paparazzo could be seen snapping shots of painter Julian Schnabel’s son Vito, now an art dealer, who was chatting away on his cell phone. The art world had come to London in force.

If the mood at Frieze serves as any indicator — and it invariably has — the market for new art is not just healthy, it’s downright exuberant. “It feels like 2007,” says dealer Thaddeus Ropac, giddily referring to the height of the last market boom. Some 50 museum groups from the world over made the trip to the fair this year, and museum machers like newly promoted New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni, Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector, and Walker Art Center director Olga Viso could be seen making the rounds of booths.

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LONDON.- Sotheby’s announced the sale of Francis Bacon’s Figure In Movement, the most significant painting by the British artist to appear at auction in several seasons, in its Evening Sale of Contemporary Art on 9 November 2010 in New York. The 1985 portrait of a man twisting and writhing, demonstrates the artist’s genius in painting the human figure in motion, and epitomizes the full spectrum of his legendary artistic technique. The monumental canvas was given by Bacon to his doctor the same year it was executed and has remained in the same collection ever since. Figure In Movement returns to New York two years after it was featured in the 2008 landmark exhibition Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which began at Tate Britain and was also shown at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. The painting, which has been on extended loan to Tate Britain for the past decade, is estimated to sell for $7/10 million*. It will be shown at Sotheby’s London from 11-15 October 2010.

Figure in Movement was Bacon’s gift to his doctor Dr. Paul Brass, who, following on from his father Dr. Stanley Brass, was Bacon’s personal physician and with whose family Bacon maintained extremely close ties until the end of the artist’s life. Bacon offered Dr. Brass a choice of paintings but when he chose a different work, the artist steered him towards Figure in Movement assuring his doctor that it was a superior painting. This is the second time that Sotheby’s has been entrusted to sell on behalf of Dr. Brass having sold a major Bacon painting in 1994. Figure in Movement was on extended loan to Tate Britain and, in addition to the Centenary Retrospective, has appeared in shows at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hayward Gallery in London and Gemeentemuseum in the Hague as well as a British Council organized exhibition in Moscow.
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HONG KONG—Next Monday the fall auction season begins in China with a jam-packed day of sales in Hong Kong. Sotheby’s will begin the market event in the morning with modern and contemporary Southeast Asian paintings, but most collectors will be focused on the afternoon sales, when Sotheby’s and Seoul Auctions will both offer highly-anticipated lots of recent Asian and Western art.

Hitting the block at Sotheby’s will be 20th-century Chinese art, a sector which consistently attracts spirited attention from Chinese mainland collectors and which provided the star lot in Christie’s spring auctions in Hong Kong, when Chen Yifei’s “String Quartet” sold for a new auction record of HK$7.85 million (US$1.01 million). The auction house’s slate this fall is particularly strong. Headlined by Sanyu’s gorgeous painting “Pink Nude on Floral Sheet” (HK$12–18 million or $1.5–2.3 million), the sale also includes masterworks by members of China’s “School of Paris,” including Zao Wou-ki and Chu Teh-chun, as well as an important 1970s work by the late great Wu Guanzhong, “A Mountain Village in the North,” that is estimated at HK$5–7 million ($644-902,000).

The Seoul Auctions afternoon sale — which opens a scant hour after Sotheby’s — covers modern and contemporary art from Asia and the West. The respected Korean auctioneers have pioneered the sale of Western art in Hong Kong and this event, with a total estimated value of HK$100 million ($12.9 million), takes their efforts to a new level with the inclusion of a beautiful late-period Marc Chagall titled “Bestiare et Musique” (1969), which is making its auction debut, carrying a HK$31.2 million ($4.0 million) estimate. This is seen as something of a litmus test for the development of the Chinese market, where collectors have almost exclusively focused on Chinese art as dealers and auction houses continue to hope that the region embraces Western art with the enthusiasm that marked Japan’s entry into this market in the 1970s.

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LONDON.- Sotheby’s Contemporary Art evening auction on Friday, 15 October, 2010, which coincides with the Frieze Art Fair in London, will present for sale 40 artworks that are estimated to realise in excess of £10 million. In addition to the outstanding pieces by leading artists such as Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach in the auction from the Collection of Jerry Hall, the world-famous American supermodel and actress, the sale will also feature important works by established artists such as Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder and Andreas Gursky, as well as pieces by a younger generation of artists including Bansky, Elizabeth Peyton and Ahmed Alsoudani, whose artworks have never before been offered at auction.

The auction record of £1.7 million for Andreas Gursky (b. 1955) was established by Sotheby’s London in 2007 for the artist’s 99 cent II (diptych), and the forthcoming October Evening Auction is to be headlined by – among other works – a major cibachrome print by the artist, Pyongyang IV. Executed by the artist in 2007 and from an edition of 7, the work is one of a series of five images that Gursky made on this subject following his 2007 visit to North Korea. The work examines the same formal themes of surface ornament and pattern that pervade many of his best works, but in an entirely different corner of our globalised society; North Korea, the last outpost of communist dictatorship. The festival, held annually to commemorate the birth of North Korea’s former leader, Kim Il Sung, is recognised as the largest event of its kind in the world and is the showpiece of the country’s dictator, Kim Jong Il. In this painstakingly choreographed spectacle, tens of thousands of gymnasts, individually hand picked for their skill, execute with mechanical precision a sequence of synchronised moves which radiate waves of energy around the Rungrado May Day Stadium, the largest stadium of its kind in the world. In the background, thirty thousand strictly disciplined school children in white attire hold up sheets of paper of a different colour at the appointed time to create a succession of background images, each child an individual tile in a monumental human mosaic. To avoid any potential political gloss, Gursky’s photograph consciously avoids depicting portraits of Kim Il Sung, Korean slogans or propagandistic images of the happy proletariat which, in the course of the spectacle, variously appear on the human screen in the background. Instead, Gursky’s camera focuses on the abstract patterns that underpin this event. The work, illustrated on page one, is estimated at £500,000-700,000. Sotheby’s sold one other work from this edition in 2008, in the New York (AUCTION) RED, well above the estimate of $300,000-400,000 for the sum of $1,375,000.
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They’re so cute. Or are they positively evil? They stare out from the canvas, wearing mischievous grins on swollen potato heads. Sometimes they clutch knives. Hanging at the corner of innocence and menace, these are Yoshitomo Nara’s kids—and they’re coming to New York.

For the first time in its history, the Asia Society Museum will dedicate its entire exhibition space to a single contemporary artist. The retrospective “Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool” (from September 9 through January 2) features 100 works tracing the neo-Pop artist’s production over the last two decades. White Ghost, two 12-foot-high sculptures depicting dog-like creatures, will stand guard outside both the museum and the Park Avenue Armory.

Nara made his mark with a heady dose of rebellion. In the ’90s, he and Takashi Murakami created work that resonated throughout Japanese youth culture and established the pair as the country’s first art superstars. While Murakami’s appeal lay in catchy and colorful motifs and hyperrefined execution, Nara’s derived from his insouciant, smudgy, and raw drawings and paintings of impish kids.

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BEIJING, July 6 (Xinhuanet) — As far as the distance is between China and Chile, it turns out that art is the perfect way to unite the two nations at opposite ends of the planet. Let’s take a look at an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art that has opened in the Chilean capital Santiago.

From the realistic depiction of Chinese coal miners, to the abstract handling of figures in traditional Chinese operas, the 83 works unveil a panorama of contemporary Chinese art in mediums including oil paintings, sculptures, and installations.

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