Contemporary Art

The UK’s leading art charity has commissioned its first-ever work by a contemporary artist as part of a campaign to boost funding for the arts.

New buyers help records tumble as London reinforces its importance

Christie’s will test the potentially lucrative waters of the Middle Eastern market in situ by holding an inaugural sale in Dubai this spring.

ST James’s gallery Frost and Reed, founded in 1808, have undergone a management shake-up and will have an increased focus on Contemporary art.

INTERNATIONAL exhibition and publishing company dmg world media have acquired Chicago-based Expressions of Culture Inc., producers of SOFA Chicago and SOFA New York.

Christie’s return higher total for a single sale, but Sotheby’s secure top price of series

London turned up the heat in the market for Contemporary art when both Sotheby’s and Christie’s achieved outstanding results at their June evening sales.

The former collection of Dmitri Snegaroff (1885-1959) was the focus of attention at the Modern and Contemporary art sale at ArtCurial (20.93% buyer’s premium) on February 22-23.

Buoyed by rising stockmarkets and the continuing strength of the euro against the pound, European private collectors were buying in force at Sotheby’s and Christie’s February round of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art sales in London.

NO more the enfant terrible of the Brit-Art world, shark man Damien Hirst is quite at home in salubrious Knightsbridge, especially after he walked away with £11m from his famous Pharmacy sale at Sotheby’s.

THE appearance of a significant Lenkiewicz forgery on the market has prompted the foundation dedicated to the artist to set up an authentication service.

Back in the late 1920s, during the height of the so-called Etching Boom, prints by Scottish contemporary artists such as Muirhead Bone, David Young Cameron and James McBey were the subject of the sort of feverish speculation which now characterises the market for cutting-edge names like Damien Hirst, Richard Prince and Maurizio Cattelan.

Damien Hirst’s tiger shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde, once the centrepiece of the Charles Saatchi collection and arguably the best-known work by a late 20th century British artist, has been sold to an American collector for a price close to £7m.

THE market for Contemporary art maintained its seemingly unstoppable momentum in New York last week.

FRIEZE, the contemporary art fair launched to much critcal and commerical acclaim in Regent’s Park last year, is to have a supporting act this October.

DECADES before Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde sheep and the 1990s explosion of Britart, London was swinging to the rhythm of Pop Art’s movers and shakers. Forty years have now passed since the height of this international movement prompting Christie’s South Kensington (19.5/12% buyer’s premium) to host the first of what they hope will become an annual Pop Art themed sale on June 30.

WITH selling rates that rarely dip below 80 per cent and steadily increasing totals that are the envy of more traditional departments, auctions of Contemporary art continue to go from strength to strength.

HAVING spent millions of pounds revamping their Bond Street flagship saleroom, could Bonhams (19.5/12% buyer’s premium) succeed in attracting the sort of prestigious consignments of Modern and Contemporary art which are going to be the life-blood of any successful international auction house in the early 21st century?

TWENTIETH century and Contemporary art underlined their status as the key growth areas for the major auction houses when London’s June round of Part I Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary sales netted £120.4m. Six months ago the equivalent sales took £94m, while back in June 2003 – when war was raging in Iraq – they could only muster a relatively modest £81m.

FLORIDA art fair Palm Beach Contemporary is to be known as PalmBeach3 for its next staging at the Palm Beach County Convention Center from January 13 to 17, 2005. The name has been chosen to reflect the new three-part structure of the event.