The scene at Sotheby's contemporary evening auction on February 15.
Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (numbered 768-4) was the top lot at Sotheby’s Contemporary Art evening auction on February 15. It made £4,857,250 in a sale which realised £50,688,450 and saw artists records for A.R. Penck and Albert Oehlen. The auction was sold 90.5% by lot and 94.6% by value and nine works sold for over one million pounds.
The second highest price was paid for Richter’s Eis of 1981 which made £4,297,250. Sharing the third highest price the evening, of £ 4,073,250 Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (“Rot”) and Jean Michel-Basquiat’s Orange Sports Figure. A.R. Penck’s Methode, Fertigzuwerden made $325,250 and an untitled work by Albert Oehlen made £445,250. Both prices were artists records. There were strong prices too for Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki. His Abstraction Figuration: 28.12.99 made £1,833,250 while 10.01.91 made £1,609,250.
Cheyenne Westphal, Sotheby’s chairman of Contemporary Art Europe, said: “We’re extremely pleased with the results of tonight’s sale and the above-estimate total of £50 million which we achieved. We witnessed a huge depth of international bidding right across the auction, with buyers coming from no fewer than 20 countries. Gerhard Richter once again dominated, with all six of his works selling for an aggregate sum of £17.6 million, above the combined estimate for the group of £14.8 million, with four of the pieces falling within the top-ten selling works in the sale.”
See post on antiquesandartireland.com for January 25, 2012.