Call it a sign of the times: Phillips’s uneven 22-lot sale on Thursday totaled £10.33 million ($13.88 million), a 32 percent drop from last year’s £15.1 million ($19.8 million) take on 31 lots.
The sale, which was 82 percent sold by lot and 84 percent by value, started strong enough, with a painting by octogenarian Austrian artist Martha Jungwirth going over estimate at £180,600 ($242,437). Next came a painting by 35-year-old Emma McIntyre, Seven Types of Ambiguity (2021), which more than doubled its high estimate to make £167,700 ($225,355)—a new world auction record for the artist. A few lots later, another artist in her mid-30s, Flora Yukhnovich, saw her 2017 painting My Body Knows Un-Heard of Songs sell solidly within estimate at £1.3 million ($1.7 million).
But that energy took a few dips. Following the Yukhnovich came Banksy’s Kate Moss (2005) portrait, which carried a high estimate of £1 million ($1.3 million) and failed to sell. (A lower-priced Banksy, Pest Control – Banksus Militus Vandalus—a taxidermied rat in a framed box—went for a just-below-estimate £348,300 [$467,000].) A few lots later came another miss: Andy Warhol’s 1981 diamond dust portrait of fashion icon Giorgio Armani, which carried a high estimate of £800,000 ($1 million).
The headliner lot, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 work on paper Untitled (Pestus), which had a £3 million ($4 million) high estimate and a third-party guarantee, sold for £2.4 million ($3.2 million)—besting, but only just, the £2.25 million ($3 million) it made at Phillips in 2020.
Four lots failed to sell, including pieces by Andreas Gursky and Sigmar Polke. At last year’s Frieze Week evening sale, the house had better luck with Gursky, when the photo New York Mercantile Exchange (2000) sold far above estimate for £609,000 ($795,000), an unusually high price for Gursky in recent history.
Robert Rauschenberg’s 1984 silkscreen Gospel Yodel (Salvage Series) sold for well above its pre-sale estimate at £709,500 ($952,000). But the consignor bought it at Sothebys, New York, in November, 2010, for $806,500. Adjusted for inflation, the consignor took a loss.
Other works overperformed their estimates, including ones by Derek Fordjour, Steven Shearer, Bernar Venet, Sean Scully, and Glenn Brown. The Venet sculpture, 222.5° Arc x 13, 2012, went for £516,000 ($693,401), over a pre-sale estimate of £250,000 – 350,000.
