Stories

This week the sales season ramps up with major auctions in Hong Kong as well as New York and some online sales. There is a particular emphasis on emerging talent.

One of the most recognizable, reproduced, and parodied images of American history comes to the block at Christie’s this spring. The auction house announced today that Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware will be featured in the 20th Century Evening Sale.

This week the block will see hundreds of lots courtesy of three prints and multiples sales. The highest value lots in these sales are largely portfolios of prints by the usual suspects, Andy Warhol and Keith Haring. 

Indiana-born, Brooklyn-based artist Robert Nava has seen steady momentum on the secondary market since his mid-pandemic auction debut in July of 2020. Collectors love his imaginative mixed-media creatures. The fantasy animals first showed up at NADA Miami and at the Dallas Art Fair displayed at Los Angeles’s Night Gallery.

As the spring season approaches, regionally specific Modern and Contemporary sales warm up the block.

Biennial appearances don’t make artists’ markets, but they do grow them. We looked at the data to see how Shara Hughes, Dana Schutz, Nicole Eisenman, and Jordan Wolfson saw their markets crack open after Whitney Biennial appearances.

An artist with a difficult past and the subject of an HBO documentary, Gianni Arone constructs a reference-heavy world through his emotive character NFTs.

Michael Armitage’s work is currently on view in a group show at the Drawing Center in New York. Later this year, in May, he will have a solo show at Kunsthalle Basel. Also in the Spring, there will be an exhibition of Armitage’s work in London at White Cube, which has represented the artist since 2015. 

Danica Lundy depicts unsentimental—and uncanny—memories of youth at Magenta Plains. Her solo exhibition of Lundy’s high-impact oil paintings will be on view through March 10th, 2022. 

The Frick’s “Living Histories” series provokes strong reactions as the contemporary Queer painter takes on Holbein

In the midst of a market hungry for contemporary African art, Phillips has partnered with Ghanaian-based art collective Artemartis to present “Birds of a Feather,” on view February 1st through 10th, 2022 at 30 Berkeley Square.

Lauren Quin’s journey from graduation to institutional acquisitions was swift. In early 2021, the ICA Miami purchased Quin’s 2021 painting Cure for Lucretia not even two years after the artist received her MFA from Yale.