New Kids on the Bloc

Courtesy Sotheby's

New Kids on the Bloc

© Damien Hirst, Courtesy Pinchuk Art Center Collection, Kiev, Ukraine

Damien Hirst's "Beautiful Explosion of Vanity Painting (with Butterflies)" (2007) is in the collection of Victor Pinchuk.

Damien Hirst Tom Friedman Jake and Dinos Chapman Pablo Picasso Cy Twombly Tom Wesselmann Henri Matisse James Rosenquist

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“I have a few dozen buyers who pay over $100,000 for a work, but overall not many Russians buy international contemporary art,” Garry Tatintsian reports from his Moscow gallery. “The contemporary market in Russia is not as vibrant as it is in the West, but it’s developing. When I started two years ago, there was a lot of hostility toward contemporary art, but now people are more open to it.”

It could be a slow awakening. At a press conference, a Sotheby’s spokesperson stated that no Russian buyers had participated in the firm’s postwar and contemporary sale in London last October. And while conceding that those who buy through European and American dealers don’t always show up in auction houses’ final tallies as “Russian,” Mikhail Kamensky, general director of Sotheby’s in Russia, says he’s convinced that the Russian presence in the international market has been exaggerated. “About 80 percent of the Russian art market will always be about Russian art,” he says. “They are still mostly buying Russian art, and this is normal for any country to spend more on national art.”

In what he characterized as “testing the waters” of the Russian market, New York dealer Larry Gagosian held a two-week group show in an elite Moscow suburb last October and featured about 40 Western works, including paintings on canvas by Glenn Brown and Christopher Wool, a sculpture by Tom Friedman and a Cy Twombly drawing. Gagosian’s staff claimed that two-thirds of the items sold, with prices ranging from $1 million to $5 million. But several who saw the show declare the selections less than impressive. “If Gagosian wants to conquer Russia’s contemporary-art market, he will have to bring much better works,” says one local collector.

The most significant collector of international contemporary art in the former Soviet Union is the Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk. In September 2006 he opened his own museum, the Pinchuk Art Center, in Kiev, and then set off on a shopping spree in the West. This past October he showed off his latest purchases, which include seven works by Damien Hirst, two paintings by Jeff Koons and six photographs by Andreas Gursky. All three artists attended the opening, as did Gagosian. “We plan to make Kiev a really important international destination for contemporary art,” Pinchuk says, adding that exposure to these works “will help modernize society, especially for the young generation.” 

Back in Moscow, the Triumf Gallery has adopted a similarly forward-looking approach. Over the past 15 months owner Emelyan Zakharov has organized exhibitions of Damien Hirst and the Chapman brothers. Ruth Addison, the gallery’s business partner in London, says that Triumf’s ambitious program merely “reflects what the market wants” and that Russians are curious to learn what the contemporary-art scene is all about.

The auction houses seem content to wait for them to acquire that knowledge. “It’s still too early for postwar and contemporary, but we will soon see a move to this,” says Ellen Berkeley, head of business development at Christie’s. “The growth has been extraordinary, and they’re moving into all areas. Don’t underestimate how important Russian buyers are for us.”

"New Kids on the Bloc" originally appeared in the March 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's March 2008 Table of Contents.