Latest news with #AlbertoGiacometti
Indian Express
7 days ago
- Business
- Indian Express
Giacometti bust goes unsold: How do art auctions work?
Expected to be the highlight of Sotheby's sale in New York, Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti's 1955 bust Grande tête mince (Grande tête de Diego) failed to find a buyer last week. One prominent reason for this failure was likely the bronze head's estimate — a whopping $70 million. In contrast to the 2015 auction record of $141.3 million for Giacometti's 1947 sculpture Pointing Man, the $70 million figure proved too intimidating. The auction market disappointment came mere days after a $30 million Andy Warhol painting was withdrawn from a Christie's sale when the consignor, who had put the work on auction, arguably realised it might not meet its asking price. These setbacks are seen as a sign of a struggling market, one that may require a reassessment of pricing expectations and collector sentiment. What are auction houses? An auction house essentially serves as an intermediary between sellers and buyers, receiving commissions from both. They may task a team to source and screen artworks based on market demand. 'Every auction is curated based on the different arts we want to feature, modern or contemporary,' Manoj Mansukhani, Chief Marketing Officer, AstaGuru Auction House, told The Indian Express. 'We need to create a mix that appeals to both seasoned collectors and new buyers. A few months are also dedicated to prepare the catalogue.' When is an artwork put up for auction? 'Historically, the primary reasons that prompt individuals to consign artworks to auction are the three D's: debt, death, and divorce', according to the Sotheby's Institute of Art. 'However, other factors such as a shift in personal taste or the need to downsize may also influence the decision to sell.' An auction house may be alerted about the existence of a rare or high-value artwork and subsequently collaborate with the owner to facilitate its sale. Christie's, for instance, remained in touch with Oslo University Hospital for over 13 years before it put MF Husain's 1954 canvas Untitled (Gram Yatra) on sale at an auction in New York in March 2025. This evocative homage to rural and pastoral life in India achieved a remarkable $13.7 million (approximately ₹118 crore), setting a new benchmark as the most expensive work of Indian art ever sold at an auction. How is the value of an artwork determined? The value of an artwork is estimated once it is verified and its provenance and authenticity are checked. Before a lot (comprising an item or a collection of items) is put up for auction, it is assigned a low and high estimate, providing a range of the expected value it could achieve. The auction catalogues reflect these estimates alongside the details of the artwork. The lower estimate typically serves as the reserve price, the minimum a seller will accept for the artwork, and below which a sale will not be made. The Husain mural sold at nearly four times its higher estimate of $3.5 million. The signature on the artwork and its provenance traced from the artist's studio onwards play a significant role in its valuation. Where it was exhibited and published are also factors taken into account. Similarly, its past or present ownership may also elevate the value. In 2016, Greek Landscape by the 'Grammarian of Art', Akbar Padamsee fetched Rs 19.9 crore at a Saffronart sale in Delhi, then a record price for the modernist. The piece was owned by Krishen Khanna, Padamsee's fellow artist and close friend, who had purchased it from artist-collector Bal Chhabda (also their close friend) over five decades back for Rs 1,000. After Saffronart sold Amrita Sher-Gil's canvas The Story Teller for Rs 61.8 crore in 2023 – then a record high price for Indian art – Dinesh Vazirani, co-founder of Saffronart told The Indian Express, 'The importance of the work in the oeuvre of the artist also plays a significant role. So, an MF Husain (who was very prolific) from the 1950s and 1960s compared to a later Husain will have a completely different (higher) value, and it will be the same for an SH Raza from the 1980s, a VS Gaitonde from the 1970s and 1980s, and a Tyeb Mehta from the 1990s (the periods during which each of these masters produced their most critically acclaimed works).' It is largely believed that the best works of Indian modernists are perhaps already with serious collectors and therefore rarely come under the auction hammer. When they do, they grab instant attention and escalating bids. In addition, some artists were less prolific than others, leading to even fewer of their works in the market. Sher-Gil, for instance, is known to have produced fewer than 200 paintings, of which a large number are with the National Gallery of Modern Art, and some are with her estate. This leaves approximately only 30-40 of her works with private collectors. How a work has been preserved or if there has been heavy restoration are considerations. Additionally, some media are traditionally more commercially favoured than others. For instance, canvases by the same artist are likely to be priced higher than drawings. A particular artwork might be distinctive in an artist's oeuvre. For instance, in the 1960s, VS Gaitonde had already started moving towards abstraction, inspired by Zen philosophy and spiritual teachings. His 1961 untitled oil with layers of pigment in tones of blue belonged to the same genre, but was cited as one of his last few horizontal canvases. When it came up for auction at a Saffronart sale in 2021, it fetched Rs 39.98 crore — a record for the highest price achieved for a work of Indian art in an auction at the time. Along with the historical sale price of similar works, the current market demand for the artist's work is also used to calculate the auction estimate. If there are no bids for a lot, or if the bidding does not reach the reserve price, the lot is bought in, meaning it remains unsold. Unsold artworks are usually returned to the consignor, who could ask the auction house to offer the artwork for auction again. This may be done after a delay, since the unsold work is considered burned, making it more difficult to find a buyer immediately at a similar price. A different scenario emerges if the artwork has a guarantee, done to ensure that it secures a pre-decided minimum price on its sale. This is practised occasionally for high-value or significant works that come up for auction. A guarantee may be offered by the auction house itself, in what is called a house guarantee. Alternately, it may be provided through an external undertaking, through a collector, gallery, or art dealer known as a third-party guarantee. The Giacometti sculpture, put on sale from the estate of real estate magnate Sheldon H Solow, who died in 2020, came to the auction without a minimum guarantee.
New York Times
13-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
With Guarantees Galore, Christie's Has a Rocky Start to Auction Week
Chandelier bidding. Quiet phone banks. Executives wiping their brows. One of the most anticipated auctions of the season proved to be anticlimactic on Monday evening at Christie's in New York, where many objects were pre-sold to guaranteed bids and there was little evidence of the enthusiastic buyers who defined the market's peak in 2022. Experts said the sale was marred by the economic uncertainty surrounding President Trump's tariffs and how they might hurt the global art market. Louise Riggio consigned nearly 40 works from the collection she built with her husband, the Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio, who died last year. A second auction on Monday night, called the 20th Century Evening Sale, fared better, with some artworks selling above their estimates and livelier bidding on the phones and in the room. The auction house had guaranteed the consignors an undisclosed minimum amount for their entire collection and then worked feverishly in recent days to offload the auction house's risk, object by object, by finding outside buyers to leave their own pre-sale bids on works by modern masters like Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti. At first glance, the Riggio collection appeared to have done fine with a $272 million total, including buyer's fees. But stripped of the fees, the sale fell short of the auction house's pre-sale expectations that included a low estimate of $252 million. 'Coming in? It should be now, ideally,' said the auctioneer, Adrien Meyer, at one point, struggling to find bidders on one of the lower-priced items in the sale, a terra-cotta vase by Picasso that ultimately sold within its estimate for $567,000, including fees. The top lot of the Riggio sale was a 1922 gridded painting by Mondrian that had once greeted visitors in the grand entryway of the bookstore tycoon's Park Avenue apartment. It sold for $47.6 million, including fees. The canvas, 'Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue,' fell short of the previous record for a Mondrian, $51 million, set just three years earlier at Sotheby's. The canvas — no bigger than a throw pillow, at nearly 21 inches square — was still a showstopper in a bleak sale. The art dealer Brett Gorvy said the Mondrian's failure to spark a bidding war was a result of its aggressive estimate, about $50 million. 'This wouldn't have been such an issue a year ago when real depth of bidding was a major factor for driving prices.' he said. 'Overpricing at the start was a deterrent with many collectors, despite the quality and rarity of the work.' As the first major sale of the auction season, the Riggio collection was seen as a bellwether for this week's major sales at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips, which have a combined estimate from $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion. The 20th Century Evening Sale that followed finished with a total of $217 million including fees, against a low estimate of $194 million — squeaking by when taking into account the buyer's fees. A major setback came mid-auction when the company announced it was withdrawing the season's most expensive Warhol painting, 'Big Electric Chair,' which had carried an estimate of about $30 million. 'The weakness of the Warhol market is a definite takeaway.' said the art adviser Jacob King after exiting the auction floor. 'There is so much uncertainty in the financial markets, the response of the auction houses was to put guarantees on everything.' But there were some signs of life. Paintings by Gerhard Richter, Vincent van Gogh and Helen Frankenthaler sold for above their high estimates, a sign of demand in the art market. 'Peupliers au Bord de l'Epte, Crépuscule,' an 1891 Monet painting of poplar trees sold for nearly $43 million including fees, after a five-minute bidding contest. The lawyer Thomas Danziger, who represented the anonymous seller behind the canvas, said the purchase — within the auction house's estimate of $30 million to $50 million — was a positive sign. 'The world has obviously changed since the frothy art market of 2022,' said Danziger. 'When it's a choice between a blue chip painting and a more speculative artwork, a savvy collector is likely to say 'Show me the Monet.'' Not all sales were created equal, however, and some successful transactions demonstrated how far the market had fallen for certain artworks. A painting by Lucio Fontana that had sold for nearly $14 million at Christie's in 2017 (or $17.4 million when adjusting for inflation) returned to the auction house on Monday evening. It sold for just $7.5 million, including fees. Bonnie Brennan, the chief executive at Christie's, said the company had a positive performance. 'It was a solid result,' she said. 'Would we have liked to see even more excited bidding in the room? Of course.' As Alex Rotter, Christie's global president, added: 'It's a healthy market. One needs to work it very hard.'
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Huma Bhabha review – ‘Giacometti is a foil to her flamboyance. She is today's Picasso'
A n artist has to ask big questions and have intense thoughts to get away with exhibiting among the profound masterpieces of Alberto Giacometti. I didn't give much for Huma Bhabha's chances. But she takes the Barbican's new daylit art gallery by storm. Grey morning light from windows that look across the brutalist ponds at St Giles Cripplegate pours through big holes in her 2019 sculpture Mask of Dimitrios. This roughly assembled human figure has plastic bags for breasts – not inflated but sagging pieces of dirty polythene – a metal chair for a skeleton enhanced by blackened dog bones, plaster arms and legs, a battered tray for a face, all tacked together over an inner emptiness. It is a troubling patchwork of a person, incomplete, unfinished – like us all. Just as Giacometti created universal images for his time, so Huma Bhabha creates them for ours. And the results are not pretty. Bhabha was born in Karachi in 1962 and lives in New York state. Giacometti died in Switzerland in 1966 after a life that shaped our very idea of seriousness in modern art. Starting out as a surrealist, creating hybrid forms at once erotic, violent and inexplicable, he became a primeval visionary whose thinned, starkly pointing or walking figures with their tall narrow faces express the reduced yet still-standing state of humanity after the second world war. The Giacometti Foundation has lent some of his purest, most archaeological figures. Four Women on a Base, cast in bronze in 1950, look like lucky Pompeiians who have walked out of the pyroclastic cloud of Vesuvius. Over by the window, another group of striding emaciated people are framed against concrete and sky – heroically anti-heroic icons of modern existence. 'This is intentional grotesquerie' … Huma Bhabha Encounters: Giacometti. But Bhabha makes poor Alberto seem museum-bound. You admire miniature figures by Giacometti standing to attention in their cases but are distracted by her rougher, rawer, terracotta-and-concrete shapes on the floor around them: a severed, chewed, gawping head, a bunch of gnarled human bones, a pair of swollen feet. Bhabha is in subtle dialogue with Giacometti – or is she ever so gently taking the piss? Her traumatised clay-covered heads, feet and other scattered parts mirror his charred ruins of humanity. Yet it is hard to tell if they are homages or parodies. As the exhibition unfolds, Giacometti becomes more and more a foil to her flamboyance, a skinny Polonius to her witty Hamlet, as her existential questions start to feel more urgent, restless and resonant than his. Giacometti, at least as represented here, is an artist who does one thing with monumental perfection. (His surrealist works would have told another story). Bhabha is an omnivorous eater and vomiter up of traditions and conventions, modern one moment, prehistoric the next, exhilaratingly embracing bad taste. In the gallery's antechamber are four massive statues with bodies that are solid rectangular blocks on which she has incised distorted outlines of body parts and interior organs. These gross, corporeal towers have titles including Mr Stone and, er, Member. This is intentional grotesquerie by an artist who is totally in control of her hideousness. Bhabha emerges as not a follower of Giacometti at all. With her savage embrace of what can only be called by that 20th-century word 'primitivism', her mixing of beauty and revulsion, her pastiches, her awe at the mystery of human existence, she is today's Picasso. Mask of Dimitrios, with its chaotic human image supported by a chair frame, is highly reminiscent of an Oceanian mask owned by Picasso, now in the Picasso Museum, Paris, which he enhanced by placing on a little wooden chair. Restless and resonant … Bhabha's Magic Carpet (2003). Photograph: Kerry McFate/Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery She is not, however, a European artist, embracing the 'primitive' from elsewhere, but a Pakistani American who sees Europe as the outsider, the incomer, the brutal stranger. Near Giacometti's striding legs she displays her 2003 piece Magic Carpet, in which two booted white legs, bum in the air, stalk over a Mughal-style rug. Yet she looks for the same kind of universal language that Giacometti and Picasso found in their ransackings of world art and myth. Her powerful statue Scout looks like an ancient Egyptian Ka figure or sarcophagus that's been burned then buried – she created its charred look by applying paint to cork. The cultural cannibalism of her art is as insolent and boldly entitled as the great 20th-century modernists. Ugliness trumps elegance in this energising show. Instead of another depressing reminder that 21st-century art isn't a patch on 20th-century modernism, it proves the opposite – that artists today are still able to find the new and wild by recooking the many cultures of our ever-shifting world. The Reform chairman recently said Britain needs more patriotic statues and less 'crazy modern art'. Huma Bhabha's art is a punch in the face for such attitudes – and a satisfying punch it is. At the Barbican, London, 8 May-10 August
Time Out
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Encounters: Giacometti at Barbican
This three-part exhibition will bring together the haunting intensity of Alberto Giacometti's elongated figures into direct conversation with contemporary artists, launching in May 2025 with Pakistani-American sculptor Huma Bhabha's post-apocalyptic forms carved from materials including cork and Styrofoam. It will be followed by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum's quietly charged explorations of exile, fragility and surveillance in September and finally Lynda Benglis's wax and latex works in February 2026. These encounters will invite visitors to see the body and the world through radically shifting perspectives, reimagined through the raw materiality and psychological weight of each artist's response.
Time Out
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Don't miss these 7 fantastic new London art exhibitions arriving in May 2025
I know we say this every month, but May really is looking like a particularly great time for art-lovers – not least because you have two bank holidays to fill with shows, as well as two major institutional openings as the V&A East Storehouse opens its doors and the National Gallery unveils its refurbished Sainsbury Wing. Of course, there are a load of excellent art and photography exhibitions already on, but if you want to see what's brand-spanking new, look ahead for our round-up of the best exhibition openings this month. From the Tate Modern's eagerly anticipated Genesis Exhibition, where you can see Do Ho Suh's vast, architectural fabric installations in the flesh, to Alberto Giacometti's spindly human-like sculptures and another photography takeover of Somerset House, London is basically bursting with new things to see and ponder over. All you need to do is find the time to go. The best new London art exhibitions in May 2025 1. ' The Genesis Exhibition – Do Ho Suh: Walk the House ' at Tate Modern The home, migration, global displacement: these are all themes Do Ho Suh explores in his work, consisting of videos, drawings, and large translucent fabric installations of interiors, objects, walls and architectural structures. Often brightly coloured, skeletal and encompassing, this survey exhibition at Tate Modern will showcase three decades the celebrated Korean-born, London-based artist, including brand-new, site-specific works on display. 'The Genesis Exhibition – Do Ho Suh: Walk the House' at Tate Modern is open from May 1 until October 26. More details here. 2. 'Fake Barn Country' at Raven Row Organised by three Londoners to reflect a 'year of discussion', this exhibition is set to explore the shared approaches and creative dialogues between a wide selection of artists. Featuring works that recall specific shows at Raven Row itself, the art you'll see tends to play on realism, making use of found objects and reused materials – you might see everyday household items or DIY tools incorporated, for example. Expect to see works by artists including Terry Atkinson, Rachal Bradley and Andrea Büttner. 'Fake Barn Country' at Raven Row is open from May 8 until July 6. More details here. 3. 'Encounters: Giacometti' at Barbican Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti was a bit of a big dawg when it came to post-WWII figurative sculpture: you might recognise his creepily elongated human figures with stretched-out limbs and wiry arms, which seem lonely, fragile, alien. Often mediating on existential themes about the human psyche, and leaning into surrealist and cubist styles, he had a huge influence on artists working with the human form. This show at Barbican is a three-part series showcasing contemporary sculptors alongside his historic works, launching in May with an exhibition of works by Huma Bhabha, followed by Mona Hatoum in September and Lynda Benglis in February 2026. 4. 'Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road' at British Museum Japan's Edo period – from 1603 to 1868 – is thought to have been mostly a time of civic peace and development, allowing new art forms to flourish. In the later part of that era, Utagawa Hiroshige produced thousands of prints capturing the landscape, nature and daily life and became one of the country's most celebrated artists. This new exhibition at the British Museum offers a rare chance to see his never-before-seen works up close (this is the the first exhibition of his work in London for a quarter of a century), spanning Hiroshige's 40-year career via prints, paintings, books and sketches. The National Gallery is celebrating its 200th birthday, and to celebrate, they've gone and refurbished their Sainsbury Wing, which has been closed for two years and houses some absolute gems of art history: Byzantine altarpieces, early renaissance works and Paolo Uccello's three-part war scene epic 'The Battle of San Romano'. The refurbed wing will include a whole room dedicated to the theme of gold and all the entire National Gallery collection is also going to be rehung. Talk about fresh. 6. Photo London at Somerset House Not quite an exhibition, but an opening no less: this year marks the 10th anniversary of Photo London, the annual photo fair taking over Somerset House with galleries and exhibitors travelling from New York, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Hsinchu City to bring some of the hottest photography talents of the world right now, from the documentary to editorial, experimental and everything in between. This year features work from photographers like David Bailey, Antony Cairns, Jamie Hawkesworth and Joy Gregory. Photo London at Somerset House is open from May 15 until May 18. More details here. 7. 'Leonardo Drew: Ubiquity II' at South London Gallery Leonardo Drew's works are silent, but they may as well be loud: they're explosive, chaotic, large-scale installations that look like you're witnessing the aftermath of an earthquake. The American artist is taking over South London gallery for his first London solo show with a site-specific work in the main gallery, made with intentionally distressed wood which looks like it's 'been through extreme weather events'. Oh, and it's free.
