Flash News

[06/09/2013]

 

Every fortnight, Artprice provides a short round up of art market news.

Beirut Art Fair

The fourth edition of the Beirut Art Fair will be held at the Beirut International Exhibition Leisure Center (BIEL) from 19 to 22 September 2013. Launched by Laure d’Hauteville, Pascal Odille and Jean-Marc Decrop, the year’s edition of the fair is strongly oriented towards emerging artists in the ME.NA.SA region (Middle East, North Africa, South & South-East Asia) and aims to reflect the region’s artistic effervescence with 57% of the galleries from the Middle East. However, the fair’s steering committee has also invited nearly fifty galleries from fourteen other countries, with a particular focus on South-East Asia (nine galleries from the region in a pavilion curated by Richard Koh).

As a symbol of the fair’s spirit of openness, the Lebanese artist Jean Marc NAHAS and the French artist Fabien VERSCHAERE will enact a pictorial performance duo to inaugurate the fair.
Jean Marc Nahas was born in Beirut in 1963 and is a recognized artist in Lebanon where three of his works have already been presented for auction and sold through Ayyam Gallery Dubai, Beirut. The two paintings and one installation sold in a price range of $6,000 – $8,000 excluding fees (on 28 January 2010 and 1 July 2010). The most important works by Verschaere (in size or as batches of drawings) can reach similar price levels at auctions, but neither artist has as yet made any significant impression outside of their home markets. One of the attractions of the Beirut Art Fair is that it offers works by well-positioned but affordable artists, focusing more on the discovery of new artists than on the already established big names.

Rudolf Stingel at Palazzo Grassi

A major exhibition… the biggest ever seen in Europe… occupying the entire interior space of the Palazzo Grassi. Rudolf STINGEL’s “total” work is covering all the rooms (approximately 7,500 m²) of François Pinault’s mid-eighteenth century Venetian landmark until 31 December 2013, i.e. throughout the 55th Venice Biennale. Enormous rugs, inspired by ancient kilims from Azerbaijan, have been placed on the floors and the walls and they literally absorb the space. Stingel’s complex oeuvre, involving rugs, paintings, photographs and architectural items, produces a hypnotic environment where references and experiences collide: art and crafts, East and West, the original and the copy… History and personal history….

Rudolf Stingel is an Italian artist born in South Tyrol in 1956. Having participated in the Venice Biennale in 1993 and 2003, he is accustomed to the major artistic events in Venice and his work was exhibited for the first time at the Palazzo Grassi in 2011 (The World Belongs to You). His auction prices started to climb after his second participation in the Biennale. Before that, his paintings changed hands at $5,000 – $10,000 on average. The first sign of the inflation that was to follow occurred on 13 May 2005 at Phillips de Pury & Company in New York when his Untitled (circa 1999) fetched $38,000 ($45,600 including fees). Today, Rudolf Stingel is among the Top 20 Contemporary artists in the world (artists born after 1945 and ranked by auction revenue over the July 2012 – June 2013 period) and since 2007, five of his best paintings have fetched 7-digit results (in dollars).

Ruth Asawa

The Japenese-American sculptor Ruth ASAWA died this summer (6 August 2013) in San Francisco.
She was known for her delicate, light and dreamlike sculptures made of metal wire and inspired by Mexican weavers. After attending Black Mountain College under Josef Albers (1946 – 1949), she learned weaving techniques from villagers of Toluca in Mexico. Her works began to be exhibited in the 1950s, notably at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Bienal de São Paulo. They are now part of the collections of major museums, including the Guggenheim. Yet Ruth Asawa has remained a discreet artist on the auction market with about only fifty works offered since the 1990s. At that time, her major works could be acquired for less than $10,000 and her price index didn’t start climbing until 2007 when one of her suspended sculptures – a sort of abstract Janus throwing its ramifications into the air – more than doubled its high estimate at Bonhams & Butterfields with a result of $50,000 (Untitled [1960], 19 November 2007, Los Angeles). Thereafter, her prices rose sharply and on 15 May earlier this year she received full market consecration with a 7-digit auction result at Christie’s New York, just three months before her death (Untitled S.108 Hanging, Six-Lobed, Multi-Layered Continuous Form within a Form) [circa 1960] at $1.2 million against an estimate of $250,000 – $350,000). Not all her work is expensive however, and some of her drawings can be acquired for between $1,000 and $5,000. However, her sculptures are so rare and sought-after that they easily exceed their pre-sale estimates.