A monumental work by German painter Gerhard Richter will hit the auction block at Phillips next month in New York after touring Hong Kong and Taipei for an estimate in the range of US$30 million.
Phillips will sell Abstraktes Bild, 1987, on Nov. 13 “as the star lot of the house’s international fall auction season,” according to an announcement.
With two panels that measure 9 feet tall and 13 feet wide, the painting is “one of the largest works from Richter’s oeuvre to ever be offered at auction,” Phillips said. Though Richter painted other works as part of the Abstrakte Bilder series from 1986-1989, the only one on a similar scale to the work set for auction is in Lisbon’s Museu Coleção Berardo.
“Painted shortly after the artist moved away from his figurative, photo-based painting, Abstraktes Bild reveals the explosive power, depth of color, and emotional resonance that would distinguish Richter as one of the most profound abstract painters of his generation,” Phillips said.
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The auctioneers are hoping for a better outcome than they saw in March, when a Richter painting was withdrawn from bidding after preliminary bids fell short of expectations. French collector Marcel Brient had offered Richter’s 1983 abstract work Mathis, along with an untitled 1994 Willem de Kooning painting, for a combined estimate between £17 million and £24 million (about US$21.2 million and US$30 million).
“The market for Richter has only grown in recent seasons, something particularly evidenced by the fact that he now boasts representation by one of the most significant international galleries,” said Jeremiah Evarts, deputy chairman of Phillips. “We’re seeing strong prices for works that are particularly important within his oeuvre and this Abstraktes Bild is a phenomenal example of just such a painting.”
Evarts said he “would love to see a museum acquire the painting. Most of the nine works from this large-scale series are already held by major institutions, including the Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Toyama Prefectural Museum in Japan. It will be exciting to see where the work finds its new home.”
Along with abstract paintings, Richter’s work has encompassed grid-like Colour Charts, 1977’s infamous Baader-Meinhof series, photo paintings, and portraits.
“Photographs, private ones and others, keep appearing that fascinate me so much that I want to paint them. And sometimes the real meaning these images have for me only becomes apparent later,” he told German magazine Spiegel in 2005.
Richter’s auction record stands at US$46.3 million for a 1986 Abstraktes Bild sold in 2015 by Sotheby’s in London. A similar work with the same title helped the 91-year-old painter set a 2020 record as the most expensive Western artist to sell at an Asian auction. That Abstraktes Bild sold in October 2020 for HK$214.6 million (US$27.6 million) at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong.
The elite end of the art market has faced a rough ride in 2023. Global auction sales from Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips decreased 18% during the first half of 2023, according to a July report from London art-market analyst firm ArtTactic, with sales of US$5.8 billion compared to US$7.1 billion in the same period last year. Artnet reported that Phillips’ global sales sank 39% in the first half of 2023 compared to the same period in 2022.
But experts in the industry have cautioned against calling recent financial results “a correction.” New York’s Bonhams, for instance, reported the best results in its 250-year history in the first half of 2023, with sales of US$552 million. And there have been major recent sales, including Louise Bourgeois’s Spider, 1996,, which sold at Sotheby’s in May for a record-smashing US$32.8 million.
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