Average and exceptional art

Antoni Tapies @Reina Sofia

There isn’t just one art market but many – and they meet different demands. They are stratified with distinct ways of being and rules of functioning. It is common to say, for example, that during times of crisis only exceptional pieces are well received. As for the market for the so-called “average” artworks – understood in terms of prices – it’s supposed to be stagnant. However, if you visited the Arco fair that took place from 6 to 10 March in Madrid you might feel differently. (See here the report about Arco 2023).

Increase in prices

It’s possible that the contemporary art market of today does indeed suffer from a sense that it is running out of steam, but this is due in part to the exceptional increase in prices over recent years. It’s not a rarity for works by high-profile young artists – who by definition have not yet had the time to prove themselves – to sell for several hundreds of thousands of euros, especially if they are on the roster of a multinational gallery like Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Zwirner or Pace.

Maribel Lopez

But there’s none of this at Arco. As the director of the fair Maribel Lopez explains: “We are trying to connect the right artworks with the right collectors. At Arco we’re lucky to have artworks for people who are just starting out as collectors but also for those who already have a substantial collection.

Atmosphere of security

On the other hand we perhaps do not have works at the highest prices but in a certain sense this creates an atmosphere of security. The most expensive piece in the fair is just under 3 million euros.”

Joan Miro

Joan Miro

Maribel Lopez is referring to a canvas by the abstract painter Joan Miro (1893-1983) dated from 1936 and presented by the Madrid dealer Leandro Navarro. Miro is one of the stars of the national market, along with Antoni Tapies (1923-2012).

Tapies at Reina Sofia

As showcased in the impressive retrospective on display until 24 June at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, Tapies is an artist with a long career and a remarkable body of work. He invented an abstract language with raw materials that were relatively close to the spirit of the Italian Arte Povera movement.

Tapies at Lelong

Antoni Tapies

Right at the start of the fair the Parisian Lelong gallery sold one of his large-scale canvases dating from 1989 for 950,000 euros. The Prats Nogueras Blanchard gallery from Madrid and Barcelona is representing the Tapies estate. They are presenting three works by him including a stunning 3-metre-long painting from 2008, “Grande table”, roughly daubed in white, black and brown, not unreminiscent of the wild spirit of Jean-Michel Basquiat, in the colours at least.

Alex Nogueras

Alex Nogueras sums it up: “The Tapies market is very active in Spain. We are selling works from the second half of the artist’s life. In the late 1970s, when he became more free in a way, with a more stable personal situation he experimented a lot in a style we might consider to be very current. That is what the Madrid exhibition shows.

Antoni Tapies

More generally, compared to his international contemporaries, I think his price level remains low.” According to the Artprice database the record price for the Spaniard goes up to 2 million for a work from 1961 sold in 2014. The dealer also points out that Tapies’s oeuvre is substantial in terms of quantity: close to 9000 artworks.

Jocelyn Wolff

Generally speaking the majority of the 205 participants in Arco 2024 claimed to be satisfied with their sales. This year the Parisian gallerist Jocelyn Wolff decided to not display pieces by the superstar on their roster, the Swiss painter Miriam Cahn (born in 1949). Jocelyn Wolff has a busy schedule because in May 2024 he is setting up an experimental space in New York in collaboration with an American partner, Osmos. In June 2024 he’s due to open a sculpture garden in Normandy near Etretat, a sort of open air showroom.

Franz Erhard Walter

At Arco he sold the main piece at his booth, a sculpture by German conceptual artist Franz Erhard Walter (born in 1939) for around 170,000 euros. It is made up of a series of strips of coloured fabric arranged in sequence. “Franz Erhard Walter was a Golden Lion winner at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and featured in several editions of Documenta. He is part of the history of sculpture and the Reina Sofia museum is currently displaying one of his major installations. It is exceptional value for money,” comments Jocelyn Wolff who adds:

Pricing policy

Joaquin Torres Garcia

“I have always paid a lot of attention to my pricing policy. I think the art market is in the process of moving away from collectors. The museums must be able to make purchases. Today the market is driven by people who are making a lot of money and who buy what they believe will be tomorrow’s values.”

Rubem Valentim

The Arco fair has become the European platform for Latin America because a number of collectors from these countries have a residence in Madrid. This situation also naturally attracts Latin-American gallerists. This the case for the Almeida & Dale gallery from Sao Paulo which is dedicating its entire booth to one of the leading lights of Brazilian modern art, Rubem Valentim (1922-1991). The self-taught painter produced a fascinating body of work that skilfully mixes colourful abstraction with mystical symbols from candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion.

Paul Jenkins

By the second day of the fair six works by the artist (on sale for between 40,000 and 300,000 dollars) had been sold by the gallery according to their international director, Paul Jenkins. “He was the first black Brazilian artist to be exhibited outside of the country, in 1965 in Rome. Today Valentim is the subject of a resurgence on an international scale but his value remains low at auction with a record price of 34,800 euros in 2021.

Isla Flotante

Rosario Zorraquin

Isla Flotante is a young Argentine gallery that is also based in Brazil. It is exhibiting one of its compatriots at Arco, Rosario Zorraquin (born in 1984), who makes painting in a surrealist spirit. From far away we see these colourful splashes of pastel colours. Up close these chromatic expanses are covered in lines that form evanescent figures which could resemble Dali’s scribbles.

Rosario Zorraquim

Reasonable prices

Naked bodies, a mouth, a sun… All the artist’s works have been sold, again at prices we might consider to be reasonable for a relatively young artist, for between 7000 and 15,000 dollars. “We increased her prices by 30% last year because her work has entered the collections of the museum of Buenos Aires,” explains Leopol Mones Cazon, co-founder of the gallery, who also mentions that the Perez Museum in Miami has reserved one of her works.

Josefa Ntjam

While Arco isn’t showing any tangible signs of crisis, its success probably lies in positioning itself far away from the prices in the hundreds of thousands of euros for young artists.