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November Auction Highlights
Written by Yanlin Wu
November always has a jam-packed auction schedule in New York. All three big action houses have modern and contemporary sales during the days and the evenings. Buyers from all over the world gathered for the festivity. This year, despite a widely perceived “slow” market, there are many record-breaking moments at different price points. Here are 8 highlights you should know about this season of modern and contemporary art sales from the big three auction houses:
Sotheby’s–Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian, 2019, number 2 of an edition of 3, banana and duct tape; sold for $6.24 million (paid for in crypto)
The duct-taped banana is probably the most-watched artwork of this season, attracting attention from both inside and outside the art world. By allowing crypto payment, Sotheby’s is trying to expand its clientele to this new concentration of wealth, and the buyer who won the bid with $6.2 million turns out to be Justin Sun, the founder of cryptocurrency TRON. However, the attention is a double-sided sword because most media focused on the ridiculous price of a banana but not the art historical significance of Cattelan’s Comedian. The artist–in the same line with other contemporary paradigm shakers, such as Marcel Duchamp, Jeff Koons, and Piero Manzoni–successfully stretched conceptual art's boundaries and ridiculed the art market's absurdity. Read Sotheby’s lot essay if you’re interested in more history of this work.
"To me, Comedian was not a joke; it was a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value. At art fairs, speed and business reign, so I saw it like this: if I had to be at a fair, I could sell a banana like others sell their paintings. I could play within the system, but with my rules." Maurizo Cattelan quoted in: Gareth Harris, "Maurizo Cattelan: Life is often tragic and comedic at the same time. "The Art Newspaper, 30 November, 2021 (online)
2. Sotheby’s–Ai-DA Robot (Aidan Meller), A.I. God: Portrait of Alan Turing, 2024, mixed media on canvas (sold for $1.08 million)
Another technology-related lot also attracted the crowd’s attention. Ai-Da, the “artist” of the A.I. God triptych, is an AI-powered humanoid robot artist created by gallerist Aidan Meller. The appearance of her artwork at auction stirred controversies around the ethical complications of AI, prompting questions like “why build the robot in female form?” “should the creative products of AI algorithms be considered original?” The work was sold below estimate at slightly over $1 million. The reaction to this work is polarized: some hails it as a breakthrough in the art world, while others see it a gimmick.
3. Sotheby’s–Claude Monet, Nymphéas, c. 1914-17, oil on canvas; sold for $65.5 million
2024 has been filled with whispers calling the market “slow”, but auction sales suggest that the buying power at the highest level stays strong. This water lillies painting from Monet from beauty mogul Sydell Miller’s collection is an example of the sustained high performance for blue-chip artists. After a 17-minute bidding war, Sotheby’s chairman of Asian Jen Hua secured the work for her client.
4. Christie’s–René Magritte, L’empire des lumières (The Empire of Light), 1954, oil on canvas; sold for $121 million
It is impossible to talk about auction in 2024 without talking about surrealist master René Magritte, one of the best selling artists this year. The Empire of Light (1954), a series of paintings that depicts the miraculous scene of simultaneous day and night, broke the artist’s own record. A smaller gouache-on-paper version of the Empire of Light (1956) was also sold high above estimate at $18 million at Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sales this November.
5. Christie’s–Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, 1964, oil on canvas; sold for $68 million
This piece by Ed Ruscha was the cover for Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sales, signaling the high market expectation. The lot essay calls the Standard Station as “a defining painting in the canon of American postwar art.” In this painting, Ed Ruscha combined the realism of Edward Hopper, the bold color of pop art, and the surrealist absurdity to capture the modernizing America symbolized the replacement of cowboys by cars. The work fetched a dazzling $68 million hammer price, becoming one of the most expensive works of this season.
6. Christie’s–Firelei Báez, Josephine Judas GOAT (it does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me, and the fact that it amazes you does not mean I relinquish it), 2017, oil on canvas; sold for $567,000
At Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sales, the competition bidding for emerging artists is surprisingly strong. Firelei Báez, appearing in auction for the first time, sold for $567,000, almost four times higher than the highest estimate. Josephine Judas GOAT is an “homage to diasporic women”, subverting the Western portraiture canon with her unique approach. Other rising stars at this sale include Denzil Forrester, Sasha Gordon, and Hilary Pecis.
7. Phillips Hong Kong–Li Hei Di, Orange Swim, 2021, oil on canvas
Emerging artists are breaking their own auction records not only in the US market but also abroad. Li Hei Di, the youngest artist on the roaster of Pace Gallery, broke her auction record in the Phillips Hong Kong Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Born in China and based in London, Li explores “raw desires and instinctual urges” in her paintings and other media, including sculpture, stop motion animation, and performances.
Each of these artworks and their sales can be an article itself for their art historical and market significance. This list of highlights can only capture the tip of the iceberg of the market and the ever-changing landscape of the art world. I am looking forward to discovering more rising stars and seeing more market confidence in the year ahead!
Francis Alÿs: The Gibraltar Projects, at David Zwirner
Written by Géraldine Ponti
The Mediterranean Sea holds a strong duality as both a place of freedom and constraint, beauty and violence. Francis Alÿs’s Gibraltar Projects delves into this complex interplay, exploring the Mediterranean Sea as a symbolic and physical space that carries both promise and peril.
The exhibition Gibraltar Projects: Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River at David Zwirner, features a body of works made by the Belgium artist since 2005, relating to a public action that took place simultaneously on opposite shores of the Strait of Gibraltar on August 12, 2008. Alÿs, trained as an architect, works in various media to explore our environment. The exhibition includes paintings, videos, installations, notes, drawings, and sculptures. This extensive collection explores themes and ideas connected to the 2008 action, with works created before, during, and after the event.
The filmed action consisted of a line of local children on the beach in Tarifa, each holding a small boat made from a shoe, while a counterpart line of children also with shoe-boats gathered on the beach in Tangier. The two lines of children walked into the relentless waves, trying to move toward each other.
In this project, Alÿs sought to create the illusion of a bridge over the Strait of Gibraltar, a way of interrogating this space of tension between two continents, two worlds, two cultures — a place where dreams haunt daily life. This metaphorical bridge made of children holding shoe-boats symbolizes the hope of passage, reflecting on the realities of migrants striving to cross from one shore to the other in search of a better life. The gap between the two beaches is left to our imagination, inviting us to connect the two lines of children. Alÿs leaves us with these questions: What happens in this gap? Does the sea win?
He wrote in September 2006, “According to the myth, the Strait of Gibraltar is the place where Hercules separated Europe from Africa and opened the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. The Strait seemed like the obvious place to illustrate this contradiction of our times: how can one promote global economy and at the same time limit the global flow of people across continents?”[1]. Francis Alÿs depicts the Mediterranean Sea as a physical border, both visible and invisible, between Africa and Europe. His work highlights not only the desire for exile with Alÿs’s deep poetic sensibility, but also the harsh reality migrants face in this critical zone, the danger of the sea. The waves bring the children back to shore symbolizing the limits of this passage and revealing the Mediterranean as a symbol of hope and its reality as a barrier to freedom.
Alÿs has long explored the issue of migration and the critical role of borders in the contemporary world. Alÿs has undertaken numerous projects focused on such borders, including those at the US-Mexico border, the Green Line in Jerusalem, the Turkish-Armenian border, and the Panama Canal Zone.
In this project, Alÿs leaves it to our imagination to decide whether the two lines of children will meet, overcoming the predicted impossibility of the passage. The imaginative power of this work reflects Alÿs’s poetic approach inherent to his art. This project also highlights the imaginative power of children, the fantasy worlds they create, while simultaneously reigniting his ongoing Children’s Games project. While Alÿs’s work engages with political themes, it remains deeply poetic, reflecting both the real and the imaginary.
[1] David Zwirner Website. www.davidzwirner.com
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