JUST six months after he smashed the world record price for a painting sold at auction by a living British artist, Scots-born Peter Doig may be about to set a new record with the sale of one of his most iconic works in New York next month.
In May, Doig’s painting Rosedale sold for $28.8 million in a telephone auction at Phillips, making him one of just five living artists in the world to sell an item at more than $25m.
Now Doig’s painting Red House will be sold at Phillips 20th Century and Contemporary Art Evening Sale in New York on November 16, and the auctioneers are saying that it might well exceed the guide price of $16-22m, and possibly even break Doig’s own record.
The key to the auction is that Edinburgh-born Doig, who moved to Trinidad with his family as a young boy and lives there again now, first exhibited Rosedale and Red House in his early glittering exhibitions following his graduation from Chelsea College of Arts in 1991.
Prices for his work really began to take off following his nomination for the 1994 Turner Prize, and from the late 1990s onwards, collectors vied to acquire his work, culminating in the sale of his White Canoe for $11.3m at Sotheby’s in 2007, making him the then record holder for a living European artist.
His large landscapes are particularly favoured by collectors, but he has some way to go to beat the record for a painting by any British artist, currently held by the late Francis Bacon whose triptych of his friend Lucian Freud sold for $142.2m in New York in 2013.
Freud himself holds the record for single panel piece, the Benefits Supervisor Resting, which sold for $56.2m at Christie’s in New York in 2015, the same year that Doig’s painting Swamped breached the $25m barrier, also at Christie’s in New York.
Doig’s popularity with collectors is shown by the fact that the price tag for his work at the Christie’s sale dwarves that of the two pieces by Pablo Picasso which are to be auctioned the same evening – they are estimated at $1-1.5m and $800k-1.2m respectively.
The seller of Doig’s work is remaining anonymous but he or she is set to make a considerable profit because when Red House was sold at Christie’s in London nine years ago it fetched $3.1m. Phillips head of contemporary art JP Engelen told Art News: “It’s really amazing how global the interest in Doig is.
“With Rosedale, interest really came from America, Asia, and Europe, and we’re seeing the same thing again. It’s always difficult to predict if it will break the world record or not, but I’m convinced we’ll see multiple bidders.
He added of Red House: “It has architecture, landscape, it has memories of Canada, and it comes from a pivotal period. When Doig created this work in the mid-1990s, he was transitioning from the thick impasto that defined his earlier work to more delicate compositions.
“Red House also has size on its side. It’s very rare for big paintings [by Doig] to come to the market.”
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