Warhol, Basquiat and Banksy paintings sell but spring art auction sales in Hong Kong fall
- Christie’s, Phillips and Bonhams see a drop in spring art auction sales. A Basquiat work is the priciest lot and a Banksy beats its estimate
For auction houses in the midst of a major expansion of their Hong Kong operations, the effects of the global slowdown in the art market continued during the second block of spring auctions in the city, which have just ended.
Christie’s, which will hold auctions at its new Asia-Pacific headquarters at The Henderson in Central from September, sold HK$967 million (US$123.7 million) worth of 20th and 21st century art during its last sale at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai.
This marked a further slide from last autumn’s HK$1.05 billion and was 22 per cent less than the HK$1.24 billion achieved for the same category in its spring 2023 sales. Total sales in all categories at Christie’s auctions held between May 25 and June 1 were HK$2.3 billion, compared with HK$3 billion last year.
Phillips, in its second year at its West Kowloon headquarters, was boosted by a major consignment – a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting – and pulled in HK$296 million from its modern and contemporary sales, a 22 per cent increase over the previous season but still a significant drop from last spring’s HK$473.3 million.
The Basquiat work, from 1982 and called Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari, was the third painting by the late American artist Phillips has sold this spring – the other two, like this one new to the market having previously belonged to the Italian anthropologist Francesco Pellizzi, sold for US$40.2 million (US$46.5 million with fees) and US$6.5 million (US$7.8 million with fees) in New York last month.