The entrepreneur and author Arianna Huffington is selling a 1944 painting by Françoise Gilot, estimated between £150,000 and £200,000, at Sotheby’s next month. Gilot, who died last year aged 101, gave the painting to Huffington as a gift in 1986.
The reason for selling “Portrait of Geneviève with a necklace of doves”, Huffington says, is that she wants Gilot — mostly known as Pablo Picasso’s partner and the mother of two of his children — to be more widely exposed as an artist in her own right. The two became friends while Huffington was writing her book Picasso: Creator and Destroyer (1988).
Sotheby’s has already raised expectations — its March 6 auction will be Gilot’s first appearance in a major sale in London or New York, confirms Thomas Boyd-Bowman, Sotheby’s head of Impressionist and Modern art evening sales in London.
The portrait is of Geneviève Aliquot, one of Gilot’s closest friends and a frequent sitter. It was painted at the start of Gilot’s 10-year relationship with Picasso but, Boyd-Bowman says, Gilot’s use of the dove motif in the titular necklace came before this was later adopted by Picasso. Alongside Gilot’s other works, particularly from the early 1940s, the painting demonstrates “how she belongs in an international field, beyond her biography”, he says. It could take some time to come out of Picasso’s shadow on the market, however: Gilot’s auction record stands at $1.3mn; Picasso’s at $179.4mn.
The painter Tesfaye Urgessa will represent Ethiopia at this year’s Venice Biennale in the country’s first pavilion (Palazzo Bollani, April 20-November 24). Urgessa, born in Addis Ababa in 1983, is represented by London’s Saatchi Yates gallery. “It feels like a historic moment,” says co-founder Phoebe Saatchi Yates of the country’s participation. The pavilion is commissioned by the ministry of tourism of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and curated by the British poet and broadcaster Lemn Sissay.
Saatchi Yates held a solo show of Urgessa’s work in 2021, his first in the UK, at which paintings were priced between $80,000 and $150,000. They later showed him in a Miami pop-up in 2022, to coincide with the opening of a yearlong exhibition of three of his works that were acquired by the influential Rubell Museum. The Venice showing of Urgessa’s “monumental paintings” is “not a Saatchi Yates project”, emphasises its co-founder, though the gallery will “support in whatever way it may take to get the work done”, she says.
The London gallery will have a coinciding exhibition in April, mostly of Urgessa’s works on paper and smaller paintings, mapping his process in the run-up to Venice. For his latest work, Saatchi Yates is cagey on pricing but says, “There is probably a price increase.”
As concerns grow about an economic slowdown in China, Hadrien de Montferrand has moved his HdM Gallery to bigger premises in Beijing’s 798 art district. “I’m an optimist. I opened in China in 2009, just after the [financial] crisis, when the market for Chinese contemporary artists collapsed,” he says, adding, “there will be opportunities, especially as everyone else seems to have gone.”
He acknowledges the current crisis — “Trillions are being wiped off the stock markets” — but sees silver linings within China’s own art market. “Three years ago, I was selling more western art to China, now I’m selling more Chinese art,” he says. Among his contemporary artists hitting the spot just now are Fan Jing and Hao Shiming. De Montferrand’s new gallery is currently running a 15th-anniversary exhibition that gives a “snapshot of the programme” (until February 24).
George Condo has made three new prints, each in editions of 150 and offered for $6,000 apiece, to benefit the Dia Art Foundation, which marks its 50th anniversary this year. Condo’s works will be offered through the printing platform Avant Arte, which has collaborated with the artist to make and launch the silkscreens via a “draw release”, meaning that would-be buyers can lodge an interest and are then chosen at random on March 20. The majority of all net proceeds will go to the foundation, Avant Arte confirms.
The images — two distorted “head” portraits and a louche half-length smoker in a hallucinogenic shirt — are in keeping with Condo’s “individual and psychological portraits”, says Jessica Morgan, director of the foundation. She describes Condo, a longtime trustee, as “so generous and supportive of the institution”. His ties go back further — Condo’s first job in 1979 was polishing the brass rods of Walter De Maria’s “The Broken Kilometer” (1979) in Dia SoHo, Morgan confirms.
Dia also runs spaces in Chelsea, Beacon (in the Hudson Valley) and Long Island’s Bridgehampton, as well as managing large-scale installations and projects around the world.
South African auction house Strauss & Co marks its first private selling exhibition in London with a show of the mid-century, Pretoria-born Surreal painter Alexis Preller (March 5-10, Cromwell Place). Their showing coincides with an exhibition of the artist, who died in 1975, at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town (until November 25). The artist, who was gay, worked in relative isolation on a farm for much of his career though became more open about his sexuality later in life.
Of Preller’s work, Alastair Meredith, head of Strauss’s Johannesburg art department, says that “he developed a beautiful and highly personal iconography drawn from sub-Saharan African motifs and culture, early Renaissance imagery and the hieratic traditions of Greece and Egypt.” About half of the 12-15 works on show will be for sale (£30,000-£200,000).
South Africa’s artists were the highest-grossing African nationality by auction sales last year ($29.4mn from a continental total of $79.8mn for Modern and contemporary), though with a relatively low average price of $10,397, according to an analysis published this month by ArtTactic. It ranked Preller 10th for total sales of African art between 2016 and 2023, at $11.1mn, with an average price of $49,895. This was topped by fellow South African Marlene Dumas ($55.7mn, $475,710).
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