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Key Insights from the 2024 Art Market to Guide You into the New Year
As the year comes to a close, the LVH Art Journal looks back on the developments in the art market over the past twelve months. We’ve compiled the essential takeaways from important panel discussions, and insightful reports, as well as our own conversations with leading figures in the auction world and other industry experts.
One of the key reports shaping this article is the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting, authored by art market expert Dr. Clare McAndrew. The report explores the purchasing behaviors of over 3,600 high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) across 14 major markets during 2023 and the first half of 2024. This comprehensive report offers a clear perspective on the year gone by. This article offers a detailed analysis of the key trends currently shaping the art market to help guide us confidently into the year ahead! This article will address growing interest in works by emerging and female artists, the impact of the great wealth transfer, this year’s market demographics, regional shifts with a focus on the surge in sales from China, and the latest developments at auction houses, along with what lies ahead for them in the coming year.
Increased Sales of Emerging Artists and The Crucial Role of Art Fairs
The Global Collecting report revealed that HNWIs are increasingly interested in new and emerging artists, with 52% of their expenditure in 2023 and 2024 going toward works by these artists, up from 44% in previous years. This shift reflects a broader transformation in the art market, as noted by Noah Horowitz, who said that “at Art Basel Paris we saw tremendous interest in younger artists. This is a change we’ve witnessed over the last 20 to 30 years. It used to be that the Impressionist and Modernist works were the market drivers. The last major bubble, in the late ’80s, was almost entirely Impressionist-driven, fueled largely by Japanese collectors. By the late ’90s and 2000s, when the market began to recover, it shifted toward a contemporary focus. I think that there is a cultural zeitgeist for the contemporary, where we are seeing more and more people looking at contemporary culture as the thing they want to lean into and invest in. Culture has shifted.” This growing emphasis on contemporary art, fuelled by rising interest from the public and collectors, is highlighted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new modern and contemporary wing, with the first renderings recently released.
Art fairs are increasingly recognized as essential platforms for discovering emerging talent. According to the Global Collecting Report, nearly 45% of Art Basel’s VIP attendees visit fairs specifically to find new artists or artworks to purchase, making fairs a key platform for such discoveries. There’s a growing trend of people investing in experiences rather than tangible goods, and art fairs offer the chance to do both. More than just a marketplace, art fairs provide a vibrant atmosphere where commerce meets creativity, allowing collectors to enjoy both the thrill of acquiring art and the cultural adventure of the fair itself. As Magnus Resch recently pointed out in an article for ARTnews, more people in the U.S. attend art events and museums than sports events, including NBA and NFL games.
Just as art fairs are vital for collectors to discover new artists, they are significant for galleries to find new clients. According to Artsy, 75% of those surveyed at 2023 art fairs gained new clients. However, rising costs—like shipping, travel, and accommodation—are leading galleries to scale back their participation slightly.
Purchasing Art by Female Artists and the Impact of the Great Wealth Transfer
The Global Collecting report revealed that in 2024, the share of works by female artists in HNWI collections rose to 44%, the highest level in seven years, up from 33% in 2018. Among HNWIs who spent over $10 million on art and antiques in 2024, 52% of their purchases were dedicated to female artists, while those spending between $1 million and $10 million had an even split, with 50% of their acquisitions from female artists.
Interest in historical female artists is on the rise, challenging the long-held dominance of male artists. Major institutions like the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Dia Foundation in New York have significantly expanded their collections of works by women. Within this growing focus, art by female Surrealists has become particularly sought-after, with figures like Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington leading the charge. Their works have achieved record prices, driven by both increasing scarcity and rising international demand. According to The Luxury Playbook, sales of contemporary works by female artists exceeding $1 million have more than doubled since 2018.
The increase in spending on works by female artists could also be linked to the Great Wealth Transfer. As Paul Donovan explained, “This is part of the Great Wealth Transfer. Over the next twenty years or so, around 84 trillion US dollars will change hands… There is a lot of money moving around, and what is really interesting about this money moving around is that everyone automatically assumes the kids get it all. This is not necessarily what is going to happen. A reasonable chunk of this money, particularly in Europe and the United States, which is where most of this transfer takes place, will go sideways. Stereotypically in the boomer generation, wealth was disproportionately generated by men, and genetically, their wives will outlive them, so the money goes sideways. At the moment women own and control about 30% of global wealth, and I think within the next 2 years that will be more than half. Women will start to control a majority of the global wealth. We are seeing a shift here. Of course women don’t just buy women artists. But when I buy art, I am looking to buy art that is relevant to me and my life experience, the same will go for women.”
Market Demographics: Gen X vs Millennials
The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2024 report (hereafter referred to as the Global Collecting Report) highlights that HNWIs from Generation X (those born between the mid-1960s and early 1980s) had the highest average spending in 2023, reaching $578,000—more than any other HNWI demographic. This trend continued into the first half of 2024. Millennials and Gen X consistently represented the largest group of $1M+ spenders, with 7% of buyers in 2023 falling into this category. However, while Millennial spending has decreased over the past two years, Gen X has seen modest growth (3%) and maintained the highest average spending during both 2023 and early 2024. Their spending outpaced Millennials by a third and was double that of Boomers and Gen Z. According to Noah Horowitz, the CEO of Art Basel, this shift can be attributed to Gen X’s familiarity with market cycles, which gives them confidence in the market’s ability to rebound—a perspective Millennials, with less cyclical experience, may not yet share.
In recent years, an increasing number of collectors have come to see art as a vital component of their wealth strategy. With the global art market projected to surpass $2.8 trillion by 2026, it is expected to account for roughly 11% of ultra-high-net-worth portfolios. Younger investors, particularly millennials and Gen Z, are also more inclined to hold tangible assets, with studies showing they are twice as likely to do so compared to older generations. According to the 2024 Bank of America Private Study, nearly all (98%) of these HNWIs now include art as part of their wealth management strategies, using it for purposes ranging from charitable giving and tax planning to liquidity management. This growing trend highlights art’s transformation from solely a cultural asset, into a financial tool as well.
Regional breakdown: Surge in Mainland China’s Art Market
The Global Collecting Report shows that, in 2023 and the first half of 2024, HNWIs from Mainland China outspent their counterparts from other major regions on art and antiques. In fact, HNWIs from China spent more than double the amount of any other region, and this strong return to post-lockdown spending has persisted. Art market expert Dr. Clare McAndrew explained that China’s surge in art spending followed the easing of strict Covid policies, with art being viewed as a cultural asset and promoted as such, distinct from other personal luxury goods, which have actually seen a decline in sales in China. Economist Paul Donovan noted that, globally, there’s been a shift toward spending on experiences, with art and art purchasing categorized within this sector. In China, strict Covid-19 travel restrictions redirected consumer spending toward art, as people sought to invest in meaningful experiences and collectibles. But even after the restrictions were lifted, this purchasing trend has continued. LVH Art spoke with luxury brand consultant Judith Mizrahi, who noted, “Gone are the days when Chinese consumers primarily sought out logos. Today, their interests run deeper, drawn to items that offer knowledge or carry meaningful stories. Knowledge has become a form of social currency, which may help explain the rising trend of art purchases in China, as art works provide stories, perspectives, and insights.” Another reason to explain this is Hong Kong’s position as Asia’s “freeport,” with low or no taxes and streamlined trade processes, making it an attractive hub for art transactions. Martin Wilson, chairman of the British Art Market Federation, emphasized the need for the UK to simplify its import and export procedures to remain competitive with the US and Hong Kong, which offer more favorable business conditions. While the buying trend in China remains strong, it may taper off next year, with signs of a slowdown already visible. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.
The Auction World
New York auctions have long been a key barometer for the art market’s health, so let’s take a closer look at the recent sales from November. Christie’s Postwar and Contemporary evening auction on November 21st stood out for its high-profile consignments, strong bidding, and the setting of 11 new auction records. Other noteworthy highlights included a $6.2 million Maurizio Cattelan banana at Sotheby’s and a $121.1 million Magritte at Christie’s. The sale of the Magritte painting, which made her the 16th artist to surpass the $100 million mark, was driven by an intense 10-minutes of bidding. Additionally, competitively priced works by emerging artists showed strong performance.
The overall market this year and in 2023 exhibited a more cautious tone, in contrast to the record-breaking sales of 2022, which were fuelled by pent-up demand from the pandemic era. While results were solid, many works sold for just above their estimates, which, though not a bidding frenzy, was a reassuring sign that auction houses’ expectations were aligned with the art market.
Several ultra-contemporary artists have seen remarkable success in the auction market this year. To understand their influence and future potential, we spoke with Nicole Ching, Specialist Advisor at Christie’s. She explained, “They are still an incredibly important and vital part of our auctions. The wider list of names has now been trimmed down but for this select group, they still dominate the top of our client’s wish lists and perform exceptionally well at auction. The market moves quickly, but I feel like the names that are still with us post the market correction will remain resilient and we will continue to see exceptional results for them next year.”
Single-owner sales have also remained as significant as ever. Notable examples include Sotheby’s auction of Sydell Miller’s collection and Christie’s sale of Mica Ertegun’s collection. These curated sales continue to drive strong market interest and influence. As Ashkan Baghestani, SVP and Head of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s told us, “There are three reasons why single owner sales do so well. Firstly, the art market right now is really focused and interested in new stories, and these single owner sales bring these new stories to the market. It’s the vision of a single couple or individual— their eye and what they collected ahead of the curve. Secondly, a lot of these single-owner collections include masterpieces, and at a time when access to museum-quality pieces has become harder, it makes them highly desirable. Also, they present a unique opportunity to offer a diverse range of artworks at various price points, especially when the collection offers a evening and day sale component. It’s an occasion for everyone in the market who is looking for a work with exceptional provenance.”
Auction houses are expanding to solidify their global presence. Sotheby’s moved into a larger space in Paris in October and have also taken over Hong Kong’s Chater House, previously occupied by Armani. They’ve also acquired the Breuer Building on Madison Avenue, which will become their new headquarters in 2025, and will be what Mr. Baghestani describes as “a huge moment for Sotheby’s. The building carries an incredible energy from the works it has hosted in its lifetime, and it will be great to continue that with our auctions and exhibitions that feature museum quality works.”
In September 2024, Christie’s unveiled its new Asia headquarters at The Henderson in Hong Kong. Kelly Crow of The Wall Street Journal notes that auction houses investing in physical spaces in Hong Kong are seeing positive returns as the market grows. She emphasized, “there is an audience (in Hong Kong) that is not going away and we can’t ignore them.” About unveiling their new headquarters in Hong Kong, Nicole from Christie’s told us that, “The Henderson is a testament to our commitment not only to the Greater China Region, but to Asia in general. We have seen strong Asian bidding across all categories internationally and we hope that having a permanent landmark location in Hong Kong will further our development there.”
The art market in the Middle East, especially in Saudi Arabia, is growing and they are establishing themselves as an increasingly influential players in the global art world. Sotheby’s is set to open a new location in Saudi Arabia in 2025. Mr. Baghestani, who is one of the leads on this inaugural auction, told us that “hosting our first auction in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at the World Heritage site of Diriyah—will be a truly unique experience. The preview will run from January 30 to February 8, and the auction will follow an evening sale format, with a split between global fine art and luxury. This takes place in a context where Saudi Arabia is growing as an art hub, under the supervision and leadership of the ministry of culture. Our auction will coincide with the Islamic Biennale in Jeddah, making it an exciting time for the arts in the region.” Christie’s was the first global auction house to obtain a commercial license to operate in Saudi Arabia, and as Nicole shared with us, “there will be some more exciting new developments in the Middle East which I can’t disclose now but you will hear about soon!”
Wrap-up
Bank of America’s latest report highlights a rise in collector engagement in 2024, driven by favorable market conditions. Their report “Art Market Update” attributes this increase to lower auction estimates, gallery discounts, and recent interest rate cuts, all of which are motivating buyers. These trends are expected to persist into 2025, creating a positive outlook for the market. While 2022 saw a full return from most COVID-19 restrictions worldwide, 2023 was a year of adaptation, as the lingering effects of the pandemic continued to impact the global economy. 2024 has continued this trend, with the art market still in a phase of recalibration. However, despite these challenges, optimism is on the rise, driven by new opportunities across regions, the expansion of innovative platforms, and a renewed energy in the art world.
Key papers, panels and discussions that informed this article include:
The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2024 report
The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global collecting panel discussion that took place on October 24th and featured four speakers: Kelly Crow, a seasoned art market journalist with The Wall Street Journal since 2006; Dr. Clare McAndrew, founder of Arts Economics and author of the report that framed the conversation; Paul Donovan, Chief Economist of UBS Global Wealth Management; and Noah Horowitz, CEO of Art Basel. The discussion centered on the Global Collecting Report, authored by Dr. McAndrew, which provides key insights into the art market.
Bank of America’s report, Art Market Update Fall 2024: Opportunity Knocks?
Art Art newspaper article – Uk Import fall 16% for second year
Financial Times article – Sotheby’s announces new outpost in Saudi Arabia by Melanie Gerlis
Financial Times article – In Miami, the art world reacts to a post-Trump landscape by Melanie Gerlis
Hockney’s Market Takes a Turn
David Hockney is without a doubt one of the leading artists of the 21st century. He made headlines in 2018 after his masterpiece, ‘Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)’ from 1972, sold for $80 million at auction, making Hockney the most expensive living artist and skyrocketing demand for his works. The past couple of years has seen a stream of other swimming pool works come to auction, in hopes of fetching similar excitement as seen from the historic 2018 sale. However, the market’s fixation on Hockney’s swimming pool works has led to other series of work to be largely overshadowed. That being said, recent market activity suggests that might be changing.
At a recent Christie’s sale, three works by Hockney, all owned by mega-collector Paul Allen, depicting the Yorkshire countryside and painted after the turn of the century, blew through their estimates, sparking up heated bidding wars in the auction room and suggesting newfound interest in the artist’s later series of landscapes.
In 2005, Hockney left Los Angeles and returned back to England, settling in East Yorkshire. This move marked a new chapter in his career. Over the ensuing years, Hockney worked across mediums, spanning canvas works to iPad drawings, to illustrate the changing seasons and evolving beauty of the surrounding landscape. Up until now, these later works have been largely under-appreciated compared to Hockney’s more famous series of swimming pools and double portraits from the 70s and 80s.
Fuelling the recent demand for Hockney’s later landscapes could be the fact that earlier Hockney works have hit such a significant price-high that it’s nearly impossible for newer collectors to buy in. The later landscapes still retain all the stylistic traits specific to Hockney’s practice but at a significantly lower price point.
Hockney’s market rise over the past decade can in part be credited to a series of sell-out institutions retrospectives between 2017 and 2018. Taking place at the Tate in London in early 2017, the Centre Pompidou in late 2017, and finally the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 2018, Hockney’s institutional recognition secured his place within art history and saw an influx of works come to auction. Looking at the latest auction results, we can see that Hockney’s later landscapes have seemingly doubled in value since the retrospective tour. One of Allen’s works, a painting of the artist’s home engulfed by trees and plants, entitled ‘The Gate’ (2000), sold for $14 million dollars. This comes after its previous sale of $7 million in 2016, just before the Tate retrospective launched.
To add to Hockney’s critical acclaim, the British-artist seems to have struck a chord with social-media users and the general public. David Hockney: Bigger & Closer, an immersive large-scale projection show currently on in London, has been packed out since its opening in January. Similar furore was seen with London’s previous immersive experience of Vincent Van Gogh, perhaps signalling that Hockney is becoming as recognisable to crowds as some of the masters from art history.
At the very same auction in May, a set of landscape and nature paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe also blew well past their respective estimates. Alongside Hockney, O’Keeffe’s works have been gaining similar traction at auction, begging the greater question of if we are at a point where abstraction is so omnipresent in today’s art world that collectors are craving something that harkens back to more classical modes of painting.
Inside the incredible homes of three major Asian collectors
Pierre Chen, Taiwan
Based in Taiwan, Pierre Chen is one of the world’s leading art collectors and the founder of the YAGEO Foundation.
His collection spans painting, photography and sculpture, featuring works by Gerhard Richter, Picasso, Francis Bacon, Thomas Struth, Yayoi Kusama, Peter Doig and David Hockney. Notably, it was later revealed that Chen was the buyer of David Hockney’s masterpiece, ‘Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)’ (1972), which sold for a record-breaking $90.3 million at Christie’s in 2018.
Throughout his Taiwan home, Chen’s incredible art collection is on full display. One of Peter Doig’s seminal paintings from his canoe series hangs above the dining table. A radiant yellow, orange and white composition by Mark Rothko hangs in the arched corridor. Sculptures by Yayoi Kusama feature throughout, and an intimate family portrait by Gerhard Richter hangs in the lounge.
When asked to pick his favorite works in the collection, Chen told reporters that the two that rank at the very top are Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Rome), 1971, and Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud (1965).
Tina Kim, South Korea
For Korean-born, New York-based gallerist Tina Kim, art has always been a family pastime and profession. As a collector and gallerist, Kim has led the way in bringing the Korean Dansaekhwa movement of the 1970s to international audiences—with several historical exhibitions for artists such as Park Seo-bo and Kwon Young-woo, both of whom also exist in her personal collection.
Other notable Dansaekhwa masters, such as Lee Ufan and Ha Chong-Hyun, have pride of place in Kim’s Upper West Side townhouse, but so do works by Louise Bourgeois, Anselm Kiefer, and Bill Viola, all with whom Kim has closely collaborated throughout her years in the art world.
In addition to her incredible groups of artworks, Kim is an avid collector of French design. Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, and Pierre Jeanneret are among the mid-century talents whose furnishings and objects are found throughout the home—a reflection of Kim’s late husband Jaewoong Chung’s business, Vintage20, which specialized in European furniture and decorative art from this period.
Yusaku Maezawa, Japan
Fashion entrepreneur, Yusaku Maezawa, has become a household name in the art world after a string of significant art purchases over the past decade. He’s known for his fascination with street art – most notably his obsession with Jean-Michel Basquiat.
In one two-day stretch in 2016, he bought seven works — including Bruce Nauman’s Eat War (1986), Jeff Koons’s Lobster (2007), and Alexander Calder’s Sumac 17 (1955). Following this, Maezawa made headlines in 2017 after spending $110 million on a gigantic Basquiat painting, setting a new record for the artist at auction. His collection also includes works by George Condo, Roy Lichtenstein, Christopher Wool, Joan Mitchell, Richard Prince, and more.
Inside his Tokyo apartment, Maezawa’s fascination with street and pop art is clearly seen. In the entryway, objects of design by Jean Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand are paired with a Bruce Nauman neon work and an instantly-recognisable Christopher Wool text painting. In the dining areas, sculptures by John Chamberlain and Alexander Calder hang alongside paintings by Lichtenstein and George Condo. In the living room, a massive painting Joan Mitchell takes center stage.
Artists Auction Results in 2021
The year 2021 gave rise to a marriage between traditional art market norms and new standards, where a plethora of young and veteran artists posed breakout moments and skyrocketing results at auction. In this turbulent new landscape induced by a technological race to innovate as much as by the desire to preserve the traditional praxis, these are the artists who reached new levels of success:
Magdalene Odundo
Best known for her hand-built ceramics, Kenyan-born British artist Magdalene Odundo’s pieces are not made traditionally using a wheel, but are instead created using a coiling technique. Her pieces are left unglazed and are burnished by hand, turning red-orange clay pieces into black pots or vessels that are as distinctive in their colour as they are in form. Amorphous in shape yet resembling the human body in curvature and sinuosity, the pots are vehicles for thinking about the human body and its relationship to space. Her influences vary widely, from Cycladic figures to modern sculpture by Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi.
The shift in price occurred soon after Odundo’s solo exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield Museum in 2019, resulting in one of the year’s most distinctively broken records at Sotheby’s London Evening Sale of Modern and Contemporary British Art on the 29th of June. Odundo’s carbonised terracotta vessel from 1986 sold after a seven-way contest between London, New York, and online bidders to a U.S.-based collector for a quadruple estimate record of £378,000 ($523,328).
Jadé Fadojutimi
Exploring a complex emotional landscape, Jadé Fadojutimi’s paintings offer an insight into the artist’s quest for identity and self-knowledge. In her interrogation of identity, and how it informs and is informed by one’s surroundings, Fadojutimi is fascinated by the ways in which we adorn ourselves with clothes and accessories in order to construct a sense of self. Fadojutimi explains that her works ‘question the existence of feelings and reactions to daily experiences.
Fadojutimi’s ascent can be traced back to 2019, when she became the youngest artist in the Tate collection, but her numbers truly took off in 2021, which saw the artist break the $1 million price barrier at auction three times over the course of two days in October, resulting in a new record of £1.17 million ($1.6 million) for her 2017 painting Myths of Pleasure. This market momentum seems poised to continue into next year, building off the institutional momentum of Fadojutimi’s first solo museum show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, which opened in late November.
Hilary Pecis
Hilary Pecis’s vibrant still lifes and landscape paintings feature tranquil domestic settings, textural floral arrangements, and references to the art historical canon. Her exquisitely detailed paintings exude a sense of casual comfort: With a soft, naturalistic palette, Pecis fills her tableaux with crowded tables, house plants, and hefty art books.
May was a big month for Los Angeles–based painter Hilary Pecis’s market. On May 14th, she opened her first solo show with her London gallery, Timothy Taylor, featuring her newest exquisite canvases depicting domestic interiors, still lifes, and landscapes in bright and colourful detail. Then on May 25th, her work appeared at auction for the second time ever when her verdant feline double portrait Garden Cats (2016) was offered at a Christie’s day sale in Hong Kong; the work ultimately sold for more than three times its high estimate, or HK$1.7 million (US$225,000), more than tripling her prior record.
Flora Yukhnovich
Flora Yukhnovich is acclaimed for paintings in which she adopts the language of Rococo, reimagining the dynamism of works by eighteenth-century artists such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, François Boucher, Nicolas Lancret and Jean-Antoine Watteau through a filter of contemporary cultural references including film, food and consumerism. Existing in a constantly fluctuating state between abstraction and figuration, Yukhnovich’s paintings explore ideas surrounding dualities and multiplicities, transcending painterly traditions while fusing high art with popular culture, and intellect with intuition.
Yukhnovich has had a stellar 2021. By June Yukhnovich surpassed the $1 million mark when her large-scale painting Pretty Little Thing (2019) sold for $1.18 million at a Phillips New York sale. That record would itself be smashed in October, when the textural bacchanalia of I’ll Have What She’s Having(2020) helped push its hammer price to £2.25 million ($3 million) at Sotheby’s London. Yukhnovich’s ascent looks primed to continue into next year, when the artist is scheduled to have her third solo exhibition with Victoria Miro.
Stanley Whitney
Stanley Whitney’s abstract paintings and works on paper focus on the possibilities of colour and form. He arranges his highly saturated colour fields into gridded blocks separated by energetic, gestural lines. Whitney draws on disparate influences ranging from the compositions of Titian and Velázquez to Minimalism, Color Field Painting, Southern quilts, and the freewheeling jazz of Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman; Whitney describes his loose style as musical and improvisational. While Whitney’s work is informed by his identity as a Black American, he’s less interested in explicitly focusing on race and identity than in honing a unique, abstract visual language of his own.
Hardly new on the scene, but only recently “discovered,” the 75-year-old abstract painter emerged on the auction scene in 2018 amid booming interest in works by African American artists. This Summer, his painting Light a New Wilderness (2016), a 96-by-96-inch oil on linen geometric abstraction in saturated bright colours, was sold at Christie’s for a triple estimate record £525,000 ($724,837)—a significant quantum leap.
Ewa Juszkiewicz
Ewa Juszkiewicz’s oil portraits of women turn genre conventions inside out. Beginning by producing a likeness of a historical European painting—her sources date from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century—she expertly imitates the original’s technique and style but replaces the subject’s face with a surreal or grotesque distortion. In some compositions, the Polish artist swathes her sitter’s head in folds of fabric or lush floral arrangements; in others, she redirects an elaborately plaited hairstyle to shield the woman’s face from view. The results of this process narrate a history of effacement and erasure that runs throughout the Western canon of female portraiture.
Juszkiewcz first appeared at auction in March of this year in London, where prices hit the £100,000 mark. Maria (After Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck) carried her highest low estimate yet at £30,000 ($40,000), but that was easily overtaken and sold to an online bidder from Asia for £352,800 ($480,000). The price was, however, only briefly a record. At Christie’s, the next day, the smaller Grove (2014) soared over a £25,000 ($34,000) low estimate to sell for £437,500 ($598,000).
Jenna Gribbon
Jenna Gribbon’s sumptuous, textural paintings hover between alluring intimacy and off-putting voyeurism. The Knoxville-born, Brooklyn-based artist paints her partner and close friends in intimate configurations, rethinking how fine art has long objectified women. Gribbon has said that she hopes her compositions will “jar people out of what they think they already know about consuming images of naked women.” She explains that she is “interested in what it means to see and be seen in a time where there is more imagery of both than ever before.”
This year, her impressive list of gallery shows includes Massimo De Carlo in London, Carl Kostyál in Stockholm, and the FLAG Art Foundation in New York. Gribbon has sold work at auction before; three typically small-scale paintings have made up to $37,800 since her debut last October, and Beach Glory raised the bar again, achieving £30,000 ($41,385)—five times the high estimate—after 15 bidders made a play for it.
Shara Hughes
Shara Hughes describes her lush, vibrantly chromatic images of hills, rivers, trees and shorelines, often framed by abstract patterning, as “invented landscapes.” Full of gestural effect, surface tactility and possessing a fairytale mood of reverie, these paintings, as the New Yorker described them, “use every trick in the book to seduce, but still manage to come off as guileless visions of not-so-far-away worlds.” Bold, clashing colours and shifting perspectives manifest into dream-like landscapes that push and pull the eye across the canvas, challenging conventions of space. Rather than depicting true to life landscapes, Hughes invites us into a fantastical world offered as a portal for psychological discovery and reflection.
Hughes had her breakout moment at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, but 2021 marked a new level of success for the painter. Her secondary market spurred in 2018, marking the first year Hughes broke six figures at auction. Her market grew at a steady pace in the years following, but would take a dramatic leap past the $1 million mark this fall with the sale of her painting Night Picket (2017) at a Phillips London sale in October. The upward trend continued through the end of the year, topping out with her current auction record of $1.48 million, achieved in November.
Beeple
If there’s one artist who best encapsulated the NFT feeding frenzy that shocked the art market this year, it’s Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple. At a Christie’s online auction this spring, EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS (2021), a digital composition made up of works from the artist’s 2007 “Everydays” series, went under the hammer with a starting bid of just $100. Over the following weeks, the work continued to accumulate bids, soaring to $9 million the day before the auction closed, before growing in massive leaps to an eventual hammer price of $69.34 million, a result that places Beeple firmly within the three most expensive living artists at auction, following David Hockney and Jeff Koons.
Christina Quarles
Quarles’ vibrantly coloured and textured paintings depict bodies that barely seem contained by the frame of the canvas. Body parts appear in varying states of abstraction, framed by architectural devices that create ever-shifting spaces. The ways in which her painted bodies elude definition reflects her own experience of being misread or mis-represented, as a queer cis woman, born to a black father and white mother.
This Summer, the Los Angeles–based painter became the latest rising star to join Hauser & Wirth’s roster. The support of one of the world’s most powerful galleries is a significant career benchmark for the fast-rising artist, and reflects growing collector demand for her work.Quarles saw her most significant secondary-market leaps in 2020: first in July with Placed (2017), which sold for $400,000, and then in December with Tuckt (2016), which achieved $655,200. Both works far surpassed the $100,000 high estimates Phillips had given them. This last fall, her painting “Common Ground (Worlds Apart, Miles Away)” (2016) broke her previous record selling at Sotheby’s New York The Now Evening Auction at a hammer price of $ 550,000, far surpassing the estimate of $ 120,000 – $ 180,000.
A Guide to Roy Lichtenstein’s Market
Earlier this month, the Albertina Museum in Vienna opened its doors to their latest exhibition, a solo presentation of Roy Lichtenstein to mark his centenary. The Albertina show is just one of a recent wave of exhibitions and presentations on Lichtenstein’s work, which in turn is sparking newfound interest in his market. This excitement will culminate in 2026, when the Whitney Museum in New York is due to open their much-anticipated Lichtenstein retrospective.
Given all the excitement and buzz surrounding Lichtenstein, we thought it would be worth taking a deep dive into his body of work and his market. Lichtenstein was a prolific creator, constantly changing his approach, both thematically and stylistically, until the end of his life. We will break down the four major series that defined his career.
Lichtenstein’s Girls
While technically they fall under the larger group of Lichtenstein’s early comic book series, the sub-group of his female portraits from the ‘60s have become arguably Lichtenstein’s most recognisable and most desirable works. Like his other comic book works, Lichtenstein pulled images of women directly from newspaper clippings and romantic comic books. He scrutinised his female subjects, editing and re-presenting their image, which was often depicted in these comics as crying or in states of distress, on an enlarged scale. Many of his ‘60s female portraits now reside in museums, viewed as some of Lichtenstein’s most important contributions to contemporary art. On the rare occasion that one does come to market, they have historically always set new record prices for the artist.The most recent being in 2015, when his painting ‘Nurse’ (1964) fetched $95 million at Christie’s.
Cubism
The genre of Cubism was something Lichtenstein constantly explored, experimented and toyed with throughout his career. In the ‘60s, he first experimented with Cubism, creating a series of paintings that were direct homages of Picasso works. In the mid ‘70s, he began combining the Cubist aesthetic with the subject of still life. In the late ‘70s, he merged landscapes, portraits and even sculpture with Cubism. They serve as further evidence of how prolific Lichtenstein was in terms of referencing art history and historical movements, and transforming them through his Pop lens. His Cubism works have also proven to be particularly desirable with collectors, particularly his first early explorations with Cubism from the ‘60s. His homage to Picasso, ‘Woman with Flowered Hat’ from 1963, sold for $56 million in 2013.
Landscapes
Landscapes were a recurring subject and constant fascination for Lichtenstein. They first appeared at the beginning of his career, in the mid ‘60s, and then reappeared right at the end of his career, in the ‘90s. His ‘60s landscapes saw him transform images of sunsets and seascapes into his signature Pop style – a bold reinvention of one of the most traditional subjects in art history. However, when Lichtenstein re-approached the subject of the landscape in the ‘90s, he embarked on what is known as his ‘Chinese landscapes’ series, which saw him use bold lines, Ben-Day dots, and vibrant colours to create contemporary interpretations of classical Chinese landscapes. By incorporating elements of abstraction and stylisation, Lichtenstein merged traditional Chinese aesthetics with his own artistic language, resulting in visually striking compositions that paid homage to the past while reflecting the zeitgeist of the present.
Brushstrokes
Lichtenstein’s ‘Brushstroke paintings’, created between the mid-late 1960s and early 1980s, feature oversized, stylised depictions of brushstrokes rendered in his signature comic book-inspired style. These paintings play with the idea of illusion and reality. While the brushstrokes appear to be spontaneous and gestural, they are meticulously planned and executed, revealing Lichtenstein’s acute attention to detail. The Brushstroke paintings are often interpreted as a commentary on the commodification of art and the role of the artist in contemporary society. By elevating the brushstroke, a fundamental element of painting, to the status of the subject itself, Lichtenstein challenges traditional notions of artistic originality and authenticity.
