Christie’s brings some Los Angeles warmth to a wintry London this week where it will show its star consignment for March: David Hockney’s “California” (1965), estimated at around £16mn. The early pool painting was made soon after the British artist first went to LA in 1964 and has “a sense of optimism in its bright, fresh colours, so different his work in the 1950s”, says Katharine Arnold, Christie’s head of postwar and contemporary art, Europe.
With its two seemingly carefree, naked figures painted on moving water, the work anticipates some of the artist’s most famed works, including his “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” (1972), which made a public record for any living artist when Christie’s sold it for $90.3mn in 2018. This remains Hockney’s record price, though Jeff Koons pipped his living artist record the following year.
The significance of the latest Christie’s work goes beyond its large scale and bright colours, Arnold says. She finds that for the artist, who is gay, “the freedom of the 1960s and the liberation of living how you want to, comes through. That was what the American dream brought — as well as having a swimming pool in your garden.”
The work has been in the same European collection since it was bought from Kasmin gallery in 1968 and has barely been displayed. It is offered with a third-party guarantee in London on March 7.
The Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose critically acclaimed solo show closed this month at London’s Hayward Gallery, is now represented globally by Lisson Gallery. “I feel like I have found a new family,” Sugimoto says of the move. Lisson will work alongside his other representatives, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and Gallery Koyanagi in Tokyo. The artist previously showed with Marian Goodman.
Lisson’s first Sugimoto exhibition will open in its New York gallery in May and will be of the artist’s recent Opticks series of large-scale photographs that use a prism to split light into its constituent colours, creating ethereal, abstract compositions ($250,000 each, one edition of each available to buy).
In other representation news, New York’s Hollis Taggart gallery has taken on the estates of the married couple, Charles Seliger — a first-generation abstract expressionist — and Ruth Lewin, a so-called Indian Space Painter, whose abstract work was influenced by the Indigenous artists of the Pacific Northwest. The gallery opens a show of both on February 22.
Hats off to Vanessa Carlos, co-founder of Carlos/Ishikawa gallery and the founder of Condo, a contemporary art gallery-sharing event that returned to London after a three-year hiatus to much praise last weekend. London’s cutting-edge gallerists voiced their appreciation for the event, which brought weekend walk-ins across its 23 spaces in the otherwise quiet winter months.
“It is such a great way to get everyone out of hibernation and kick-start the year,” said Harry Dougall, who co-founded Public in London’s East End in 2020. He is showing work by the young Danish painter Victor Bengtsson (£6,000-£18,000) and has invited Mexico City’s Peana gallery to his space. They are giving their first solo showing of the Oaxaca performance artist Vica Pacheco, whose ceramic hydraulic flutes hang to great effect from the basement’s ceiling ($3,000-$3,500).
New York gallerist Gabrielle Giattino, who runs Bureau, is at Kate MacGarry’s space in Shoreditch and notes that Condo has helped give their artists a showing while the Manhattan gallery is closed for renovation. The pairing results in a group show of three artists from each gallery, including Erica Baum and Goshka Macuga, who was at the opening. Condo London runs until February 17.
Mindful of challenges to the traditional gallery model, Pace has bolstered its leadership team with the hire of former Gagosian long-timer Gary Waterston, in the newly created role of executive vice-president of global sales and operations. Waterston says that “for the bigger galleries to succeed, they need to be seen as a place where younger people and artists want to work and to stay”, something he sees as key to his managerial remit.
Waterston left Gagosian in 2020, after 18 years, latterly as its managing director for Europe, to join an art world funding start-up, Atlantic Contemporary. The pandemic-prompted move gave him time to reflect and now, he says, “I am back doing what I want to do, work with artists.” Waterston will be based in London, which he describes as a significant commitment by Pace — headquartered in New York — to “a city I believe in and the timezone centre of the global [art] industry”. He joins on February 1.
Elsewhere in London, James Richards has left Daniel Katz, where he was gallery manager and head of research, and joined Charles Ede as a director this week.
London’s Eye of the Collector fair has changed the venue and timing for its fourth edition this year. “It’s good to do things differently and have a fresh perspective,” says founder Nazy Vassegh. This year’s fair will run on June 26-29 in the Garrison Chapel, a deconsecrated church run by the King’s Foundation on London’s Chelsea Barracks site. The venue, completed in 1859, is even older than Eye’s location for the past two years, Two Temple Pace, which dates to 1895, though the Garrison Chapel’s Romanesque-Byzantine interior has a lighter, more contemporary feel, and offers one big room for display. The fair, already one of the smallest on the circuit with 21 galleries participating last year, will shrink more, Vassegh says, but she welcomes the opportunity to be “even more thoughtful, considered and sustainable,” adding “we think small is beautiful”.
The new timing means that rather than clash with New York’s fairs and auctions in May, the fair will instead coincide with London’s summer season. Nearby will be the second edition of Treasure House fair, which runs June 26-July 2 in the Royal Hospital Chelsea site that used to house Masterpiece.
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