Art Market News in Brief!

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

And the artists nominated for the 2013 Marcel Duchamp Prize are…

On 7 February, the ADIAF (Association for the International Diffusion of French Art) revealed the names of the four artists nominated for the 12th Marcel Duchamp Prize edition. Established in 2000, this distinction is awarded each year for the visual artists born (or living) in France considered as the most innovatives by the collectors’ association. The winner receives €35,000 from the ADIAF, and a three-month exhibition in the Centre Pompidou.
This year, the competitors are Farah Atassi, Latifa Echakhch, the Claire Fontaine collective (created in 2004) and Raphaël Zarka. Atassi, a painter who graduated from ENSBA (fine arts school) in Paris, is currently presenting her work at the Centre Pompidou as part of the group exhibition Fruits de la Passion (until 2 September 2013). Meanwhile, Echakhch, represented by the Kamel Mennour gallery, recently opened Laps, an exhibition devoted to her by the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon, which runs until 14 April 2013. The four artists will also be in the spotlight at the Marcel Duchamp Prize exhibition during the FIAC, the key event for collectors in the French capital.
Only the Claire Fontaine collection has a sale under its belt with an enhanced print : This neon sign was made by… (2009), which went for nearly $900 at Christie’s, and doubled its low estimate (Amsterdam, 20/05/2009). Marcel Duchamp Prize always boosts demand in the months following the artists’consecration but it only slightly helps them selling on the second market.

The Gagosian Gallery exhibits Helen Frankenthaler

Between 8 March and 13 April 2013, the Gagosian gallery (New York) will be devoting an exhibition to the abstract works of Helen Frankenthaler, the New York painter who died in 2011. Entitled Painted on 21st Street, the exhibition retraces the career of the American artist from 1950 to 1959 through some thirty works mainly from the artist’s estate and the MoMA, with which the New York gallery has collaborated. It includes iconic pieces such as the Painted on 21st Street series, and Mountains and Sea, representative of the abstract expressionism of which Frankenthaler was the heir and standard-bearer.
The artist’s large-scale paintings change hands regularly at over $100,000 on the second market. Royal Fireworks (1975), a panoramic acrylic on canvas (152 cm x 398 cm), brought the artist a record sale price of $680,000 a few weeks before she died (Christie’s New York, 09/11/2011). While Frankenthaler is considered as one of the leading lights of abstract expressionism, her market is almost exclusively American: 95% of transactions take place in her native country, and represented 98% of her turnover in the period between 2000 and 2011.

L.N. Tallur wins the Skoda Prize

For the last three years, the Skoda Prize, a kind of Indian equivalent of the Turner or the Marcel Duchamp Prizes, has been rewarding Indian artists aged under 50. After the watercolours of Mithu Sen in 2010 and the photographies of Navin Thomas in 2011, the 2012 prize, presented during the Indian Art Fair, went to the young sculptor L. N. Tallur. The great winner was competing against Srinivasa Prasad, the group of artists known as CAMP (founded in 2007) and Shilpa Gupta, already well-known in the sales rooms, where his record has held its way since 2008 at over $39,000 (Untitled, Sotheby’s London, 2 May 2008).
While some critics already see him as the future Anish Kapoor, he still has a long way to go, but his journey has begun under the best possible auspices. Only one sculpture, Black Humour, was sold in 2006 for the splendid sum of $8,300 (Christie’s Hong Kong, 28 May). New York’s Jack Shainman gallery will be hosting the artist in 2013, after his one-man shows in Berlin and New Delhi in 2012.

Barthelemy Toguo

Starting on 23 February, the Saint-Étienne Modern Art Museum will be hosting Talking To the Moon, the first monographic exhibition in France of Cameroon-born artist Barthelemy Toguo. His works will be staged against the singular setting of a huge spider’s web. In the Bamileke culture of Cameroon, the spider is powerfully symbolic, evoking wisdom, patience and freedom: all themes dear to the artist.
While Barthelemy Toguo’s output includes videos, sculptures, performances, installations, paintings and drawings, he is chiefly known for his large watercolours, his favourite form of expression. In 2008, he made a promising entrance into the auction room with one of these, The Lovers in the Garden, which was bought for $20,000 (Artcurial, 29 January). To date this remains his sale record. Since then, mainly small-format, less successful works have gone under the hammer, selling for between $1000 and $1,500. Only two works at the same level as his record price were proposed in 2009 and 2010: Processing, which went for $17,800 (Artcurial, 7 December) and Purification, which went for less after an identical estimate, €15,000 – €20,000 (Arcurial, 24 October). As he lives in France, his works mainly go up for auction in the French market. Although an attempt to establish a presence in the US did not attract collectors’ attention, a Belgian auction house recently brought the hammer down at $7,000 on a painting from 2001, quintupling its low estimate (Vanderkindere, Brussels, 13 November 2012).