The artwork market has a powerful Surrealist vibe coming into the autumn season.
It struck me as I rushed round New York final week, from the Armory Present to satellite tv for pc occasions and gallery exhibitions. The aesthetic felt sizzling in a approach it hasn’t for some time and lined segments of the market starting from extremely modern to historic. And when it got here to costs, these felt fairly surreal, too.
Take Christina Quarles, 37, whose model new work at Hauser & Wirth are priced as excessive as $1.2 million. Most had been created this summer time throughout her residency in Somerset, England, the place the mega gallery operates a boutique resort, restaurant, and farm.
Different new works by the artist are featured in Venice Biennale, the place the primary exhibition, “The Milk of Desires,” explores the legacy of Surrealism by the lens of feminism. All this vitality helped push the artist’s 2019 portray, Night time Fell Upon Us Up On Us, to a file $4.5 million at Sotheby’s in Might.
Christina Quarles, The Night time That Fell Upon Us Up On Us (2019). Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
If that looks like a giant quantity (and it’s—Quarles’s earlier excessive of $685,500 was set simply six months earlier), think about that the most costly Impressionist and Fashionable paintings bought at public sale up to now this yr is Rene Magritte’s L’empire des lumières (1961), which fetched $79.4 million at Sotheby’s London in March. When was the final time a Surrealist artist beat Monet and Picasso, individuals?
“There’s a renewed curiosity within the Surrealist language, the strategy to figuration, the sense of the uncanny, the dream-likeness,” stated John Corbett, co-owner of Chicago-based Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery, whose sales space on the Unbiased twentieth Century honest centered on Surrealist work. “I’m studying plenty of fiction by youthful writers and there’s plenty of that there as nicely. You see it in movies. Magical realism is making a resurgence. There’s one thing about this materials that appears related proper now.”
The Unbiased exhibitors leaned into historic Surrealist materials. I’ve already written concerning the discovery of Stanislao Lepri, an Italian artist and paramour of fellow Surrealist Leonor Fini, who was the topic of a solo presentation at Tommaso Calabro gallery from Milan. By the point the present ended, the gallery reported 10 gross sales, with costs starting from $40,000 to $70,000. (All reported costs are asking costs; gross sales usually contain confidential reductions supplied to consumers.)
Stanislao Lepri, Le Créateur des anges (1969), supplied by Milan’s Galleria Tommaso Calabro on the Unbiased twentieth Century artwork honest in New York.
And there was extra! Corbett vs. Dempsey bought a diptych by Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–77), a Midwestern Surrealist, for $300,000. (Twelve of Abercrombie’s high 20 public sale costs have additionally been set this yr.) In the meantime, Paris-based Galerie 1900-2000, which focuses on Surrealism and Dada, discovered consumers for items by Francis Picabia and Andre Breton, who co-founded the motion after World Battle I.
However Surrealism has developed past the twentieth century. Its dreamlike aesthetics and dedication to the uncanny and automatism have come to characterize a giant umbrella for lots of latest artwork being made at present.
“It’s a cyclical style that’s taking place in the meanwhile,” stated advisor Todd Levin, who positioned many Surrealist works, each historic and modern, over time. “It means plenty of various things to plenty of completely different individuals.”
Lately, it’s a catchall for a specific type of representational portray—fairly often, it’s figuration with a twist.
Gertrude Abercrombie, Bushes of Life: Elements 1 & 2 (1949–50). Courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey.
“This phrase could be so overused nowadays,” stated Invoice Powers, whose Half Gallery confirmed miniature work by Hong Kong artist Chang Ya Chin on the Armory Present that may be seen popping out of that custom. The three works on view bought for $7,000 to $10,000.
Jessica Silverman Gallery from San Francisco rapidly positioned a smooth pastel on paper work, Absolutely Dilated, by Loie Hollowell for $60,000. The star artist’s early work was impressed by Surrealism and it’s heading again in that path once more.
Loie Hollowell, Absolutely Dilated, July 9, 2022 (2022). Courtesy of the artist; Tempo Gallery; and Jessica
Silverman, San Francisco.
Belgian Galerie Rodolphe Janssen staged a solo presentation by its countryman Thomas Lerooy, whose intimately scaled Surrealist work play with dualities, without delay humorous and critical, engaging and grotesque. The gallery stated it bought seven of the ten work, priced at €28,000 and €34,000. One went to Asia and the remaining to the U.S. collectors.
А huge hit of the Spring/Break artwork honest was Vermont’s Kishka Gallery & Library, which crammed its sales space with 100 playful and colourful porcelain creatures by Megan Bogonovich. Evocative of human, floral, and alien kinds (my colleague Sarah Cascone dubbed it “Seussean”), these small, clustering creatures had been priced at $700 to $1,200 every—and promoting like hotcakes on the opening day.
Gallery exhibits, too, embraced the temper. Luxembourg & Co, a brand new gallery by veteran vendor Daniella Luxembourg and her daughter Alma Luxembourg, opened on the Fuller Constructing with a present of Joan Miro. Works on the market vary from $3 million to $9 million, and two are insured for greater than $20 million, the gallery stated.
Instalation view, “Joan Miró: Ft on the Floor, Eyes on the Stars” at Luxembourg + Co. New York. Photograph: Andy Romer.
A few blocks south, throngs of followers poured into Anton Kern gallery to see new work, works on paper, and sculptures by hair-obsessed millennial artist Julie Curtiss. A gouache titled Pinch depicted a heron grabbing a feminine nipple with its lengthy, pink beak. A portray titled The balcony deftly rendered sidelocks, fur hat, and hair of a faceless Hasidic household.
The present, “Somnambules,” was bought by the opening night time, with costs starting from $22,000 to $250,000. Collector Carole Server informed me excitedly that she purchased one of many work, Ready Room (I later discovered its asking value was $120,000, nonetheless approach under the artist’s public sale file of $466,200). Keep in mind, solely 5 years in the past, work by Curtiss, then an rising artist, had been $3,000 to $6,000 at 106 Inexperienced gallery.
“It’s a reasonably good indicator of the curiosity in her work and of the overheated market which we’re in proper now,” stated Corbett in response to the worth differential. “It’s exhausting on the first market to keep up disproportionately decrease costs from the secondary market with out turning it right into a flippers’ paradise.”
Comply with Artnet Information on Fb:
Need to keep forward of the artwork world? Subscribe to our e-newsletter to get the breaking information, eye-opening interviews, and incisive essential takes that drive the dialog ahead.
