Art Fairs
Price Check! Here’s What Sold—and For How Much—at the 2019 Edition of FIAC
Here's what art dealers say they sold at the Paris fair (though watch out for number-fudging and other kinds of general sneakiness).
Here's what art dealers say they sold at the Paris fair (though watch out for number-fudging and other kinds of general sneakiness).
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Despite some inclement weather at FIAC in Paris, which took the wind out of Yayoi Kusama’s inflatable pumpkin at the main entrance and spread some rogue bits of an art installation’s cotton candy at well-heeled guests, reports from the fair were upbeat. While concrete sales remained somewhat elusive, there was genuine enthusiasm for the event and for the city itself, which was described as “buzzing” by reporters on the ground as they flitted from the opening of David Zwirner’s new gallery to the high-ceilinged Grand Palais.
“We sold almost everything, and I didn’t have to do anything,” Pace’s Marc Glimcher told artnet News, noting that he “lost a few friends” over fights for Yoshitomo Nara’s drawings on the heels of the artist’s record auction result in Hong Kong.
To get a sense of how FIAC fared amid the renewed enthusiasm for Paris, helped along by an impending Brexit, we combed through reported sales from the nearly 200 participating galleries. Nota bene: Sales reports are notoriously slippery in the art world. Some purchases may have been finalized long before the fair, while others might only be handshake deals, still waiting on paperwork and cash. But prices themselves are more reliably telling, providing a snapshot of where individual artists stand in the matrix of the art market today. Even here, of course, there is room for slippage: Some dealers occasionally offer inflated figures, while others prefer to report ranges or the “asking price” to obscure the actual selling price, or to cover up favorable treatment that one buyer may have received over another. We also do not include reported sales unaccompanied by a price or price range in our list, so the galleries that tend to disclose figures are disproportionately represented here.
See below for a round-up of sales at the glamorous Paris affair. All prices below have been sorted by medium and price and converted to USD (rounded to the nearest hundred) for ease of reading.
$1.75 million: Louise Bourgeois, I Want To Be Sure You Love Me !! (2008) at Hauser & Wirth
$1.7 million: Robert Rauschenberg’s Everglade (Borealis) (1990) at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
$1.3 million: Georg Baselitz, Im Takt aber leise (2019) at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
$1.2 million: Mark Bradford’s Painting 6 (2019) at Hauser & Wirth
$750,000: Ellen Gallagher’s Untitled (2000) at Hauser & Wirth
$625,000: Yan Pei-Ming, L’artiste a 58 ans, Yan Pei-Ming (2019) at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
$625,000: Yan Pei-Ming, L’artiste a 58 ans, Gustave Courbet (2019) at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
$400,000–500,000: Tracey Emin’s The Chopping Board (2019) at Xavier Hufkens
$480,000: Roy Lichtenstein’s Untitled (Brushstroke Head) (1986) at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
$350,000: A large painting by Kehinde Wiley at Galerie Templon
$250,000–350,000: Sterling Ruby’s WIDW. AZURE HAZE. (2019) at Xavier Hufkens
$320,000: A 2015 painting by Harold Ancart at CLEARING
$312,000: Arnulf Rainer, Kreuz, ohne Titel, (1987/88) at Thaddaeus Ropac
$276,000: Günther Förg’s Untitled (2009) at Hauser & Wirth
$200,000–250,000: Zhang Enli’s A Painter (2017) at Xavier Hufkens
$165,000: Rita Ackermann’s Mama Nagyika (2019) at Hauser & Wirth
$160,000: Takesada Matsutani’s Stream 98-3-3 (1998) at Hauser & Wirth
$75,000–80,000 each: Six works by Lucas Arruda at David Zwirner
$56,000–78,000 each: Ouattara Watts’s new paintings Soleil and Bantou at Galerie Cécile Fakhoury
$9,000 each: Nine new paintings by Alvaro Barrington at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
$1,000,000: Roni Horn’s Untitled (“[Ibsen] had a mirror in his top hat. So he sat in his cafe surreptitiously staring at himself.”), (2013-2017) at Xavier Hufkens
$515,000–644,000: Antony Gormley’s COLLAPSE (2018) at Xavier Hufkens
$512,000: Antony Gormley’s OPEN INTROVERT IV, (2018) at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
$512,000: Antony Gormley’s DIVERT, (2018) at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
$400,000–500,000: Sherrie Levine, Body Mask (AP1) (2007) at Xavier Hufkens
$420,000: Eduardo Chillida, Elogio de la lax XII (In praise of light XII) (1969) at Hauser & Wirth
$305,000: Tony Cragg’s stainless steel Gate, (2019) at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
$160,000: Jack Pierson, Move Closer (2019) at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
$50,000: Mira Schor’s Invasion Game (1990) at Lyles & King
$39,000: Oliver Beer, Double Stopping (2019) at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
$26,000: Oliver Beer, Single Stopping (2019) at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
$425,000: Lorna Simpson’s Pyramid (2019) at Hauser & Wirth
$320,000–750,000 each: Three works by Sherrie Levine at David Zwirner
$200,000: Philip Guston, Untitled (ca. 1975) at Hauser & Wirth
$35,000–150,000 each: Multiple works by Wolfgang Tillmans at David Zwirner
$30,000 each: All 22 of Jennifer Guidi’s new works on paper from the series “11:11” at David Kordansky
$4,000 each: Editions of Maria Eichhorn’s Prohibited Imports (2003/08) at Galerie Barbara Weiss