The Top 10 of Italian contemporary artists

Friday is Top day! Every other Friday, Artprice publishes a theme-based auction ranking. This week: the top ten bids for contemporary Italian artists (born after 1945).

There are just two Italian artists whose international calibre has brought them the only bids of over a million out of all their compatriots: Maurizio Cattelan and Rudolf Stingel. Not only do these two artists share the Top 10 of Italian bids, but they also account for nearly all the Top 50, apart from the 31st best bid, held by a great figure of the Transavantgarde, Enzo Cucchi (with Quadro santo (1980), knocked down for the equivalent of $92,250 on 22 June 2006 at Christie’s London).

Top 10 : the top ten bids for contemporary Italian artists (born after 1945)

Maurizio Cattelan’s record stands at $7 million for a quirky installation consisting of a hyperrealist self-portrait, where the artist enters like a burglar through a hole in the floor (ed. 3/3, on 12 May 2010 at Sotheby’s). The particularity of this installation is that the owner of the work has to sacrifice his/her own floor. This peak was achieved in 2010, the year of his solo exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan (25 September – 24 October 2010), which caused much ink to flow. This Italian troublemaker in contemporary art was responsible for L.O.V.E., a marble work 11 metres high literally giving the finger, set up opposite the Milan stock exchange. Apart from this giant digit, which was finally censored in Milan, controversy was also fuelled by the poster for the event, which featured his famous sculpture Him: a small Adolf Hitler kneeling in supplication.
However, polemic has never done any harm to Cattelan’s price index. Before the record $7 million, his most expensive work was La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), a sculpture showing Pope John Paul II felled by a meteorite, which caused a scandal in 1999 at the Royal Academy’s Apocalypse exhibition in London. La Nona Ora started by doubling its estimate on 17 May 2001 with a hammer price of $800,000 at Christie’s before landing $2.7 million three years later at Phillips de Pury & Company (11 November 2004). But his last great “feat” was a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (All, with 128 works dating from 1989 suspended in a jumble down the museum’s atrium (4 November 2011-22 January 2012), when he announced his withdrawal as an artist, causing his prices to wobble… Cattelan then decided to put an end to a flamboyant career to avoid having to play his own role indefinitely – the one so cherished by the market. As a result, in four years, his prices have fallen by 52% on average (between early 2010 and early 2014).
For the last time, the exhibition staging combined the ironic gesture and the aesthetic of failure, with hanged works representing a death sentence. While the secondary market did not collapse with this final artistic act, the pace of bidding slowed down considerably, unsold lots abounded and his works underwent a distinct downturn in price. The most significant piece sold in the first half of 2014, for example – a Cibachrome entitled Hollywood (based on an installation of the letters “Hollywood” set up on a hill overlooking Palermo’s main rubbish tip), which had sold for over $440,000 in 2011, only raised $360,000 in 2014 (Sotheby’s New York, 15 May 2014).

Meanwhile, Rudolf Stingel caused a sensation at the 55th Venice Biennial when François Pinault devoted a major exhibition to him taking up over 5,000 m² at the Palazzo Grazzi (April to December 2013). One of his best bids dates from this period, with a score of $2.1 million for a large self-portrait in oils from 2010 (more than 3 metres high), rather generously estimated at $3-5 million by Sotheby’s (13 November 2013).
In the late Nineties and early 2000s, Stingel’s works could still be bought at auction for between $2,000 and $12,000 on average. His entry into the high-end echelon of contemporary artists goes back to 2006, after three outstanding solo exhibitions at the Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Trento, Italy (2001), the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2004) and Inverleith House in Edinburgh (2006), together with an appearance at the 2003 Venice Biennial in the Italian pavilion. With a considerable career behind him, he crossed the $100,000 threshold for the first time in 2006 – and this was just the beginning of his steady rise.
He landed his first bid of over 1 million the following year – a watershed in his career, when he was firmly established by exhibitions at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Museum in New York. He has garnered twelve other bids of over 1 million since then. In 2014, not a single small format canvas sold for under $100,000, and the price of works this year lies between $300,000 and $1.3 million. Stingel now lives between New York and Bolzano, and is represented by the Gagosian Gallery.