In an online sale of works from the esteemed Zabludowicz collection of contemporary art that concluded on Tuesday, over half the artworks failed to sell. Estimated to bring in £292,000 to £435,400 ($385,100–$574,200), the sale brought in £95,377 ($126,285). (All prices reported are inclusive of fees; pre-sale estimates do not include fees.)
Anita and Chaim “Poju” Zabludowicz, who have long been among the world’s top collectors, sold 100 works from their sprawling collection of around 8,000 contemporary artworks this past week at Christie’s London. The evening sale, featuring 56 works from the collection and held on June 25, made £15.5 million ($20.5 million), led by a $5 million Philip Guston painting. The day sale, consisting of 44 lots and taking place online over a period of 12 days (June 18–30), was dedicated to the lower-value works, with estimates ranging from £500 ($662) to £80,000 ($105,925).
The majority of the art in the sale was made, and subsequently purchased by the Zabludowiczes, between 2007 and 2014 by then-emerging artists who are now in their 40s and 50s. The couple has become known for their support of young artists on the primary market. Works that failed to sell included those by Parker Ito, Nick Goss, Matt Connors, Michael Williams, and Tony Lewis.
There were some successes in the sale that went beyond their estimates, including a 2013 Sam Falls painting, Untitled (Topanga Rain, Rope, 10), that sold for £6,096 ($8,076); R.H. Quaytman’s 2010 painting Spine, Chapter 20, that sold for £8,255 ($10,937); and a Miroslaw Balka sculpture from 2007, titled 250 x 250 x 190, that sold for £15,240 ($20,191).
Two of the lots were sold with no reserve, meaning there was no minimum price set by the consignor below which it could not sell. This resulted in Elliott Hundley’s mixed-media piece from a blackbright hole, The Heart of Hekabe (2007) and Brendan Fowler’s 2010 mixed-media piece, May, 2010 (Accident / The Wood That Fell On Me In Studio May 20 2010 #’s 6-8) Wall each selling for £127 ($168) a piece; Hundley’s carried an estimate of £2,000–£3,000 ($2,650–$3,975), while Fowler’s had an estimate of £500–£700 ($662–$927).
As Katya Kazakina reported in Artnet News last week, the markets for many of the artists in the online sale have cooled, and the auction houses have stopped selling as much “ultra-contemporary” art as they did a few years ago, leading to questions about the Zabludowicz’s reasons for selling. Christie’s has marketed the sale as “a thoughtful edit by collectors preparing to hand the baton to their four children,” Kazakina wrote. But another theory floated by Kazakina, according to “several people who know the family,” is the “years of strain between the Zabludowiczes and parts of the art world over the family’s ties to Israel.”
