A Surprisingly Steady and Solid Beat at Art Basel’s Day Two

Courtesy Bortomlami Gallery

New York's Bortomlami Gallery sold Aaron Young’s “fenceMiami" for $100,000 to an Italian collector.

James Nares Tim Eitel Morris Louis Luc Tuymans Michelangelo Pistoletto Sigmar Polke Wolfgang Tillmans Mary Heilmann

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“It’s so much better for me,” said New York real-estate developer Hadley Martin Fisher. “I don’t have to make a split-second decision; now you have a day to decide as a collector.”

Fisher, accompanied by his New York art advisor, Kimberly Marrero, bought a large-scale and decidedly abstract C-print by German artist Wolfgang Tillmans at New York’s Andrea Rosen Gallery, Silver 73 from 2008, for around $80,000; a found object sculpture of a nose cone from a MiG jet, Viking from 2008 by British mainstay Fiona Banner, from Berlin’s Galerie Barbara Thumm, in the $20–40,000 range; and two new fantasy clay animation and digital video pieces from an edition of 4 by the Berlin-based Nathalie Djurberg, Moving on to greener pastures and Putting down the prey, with music in both instances by her frequent collaborator Hans Berg, from New York’s Zach Feuer Gallery for approximately $18,000 each.

“This is my second art fair experience,” said Fisher, “and it’s a different atmosphere. It’s like real-estate now, not so fast-paced.”

Veteran art advisor and Miami resident Manuel Gonzalez was equally pleased with his acquisitions for various American clients, including works by Sigmar Polke, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Luc Tuymans, and Morris Louis.

Gonzalez declined to further identify the pieces or the galleries he bought them from, but noted, “Things are slow, but people are buying. It’s a great fair. People thought it was going to be a complete and total dud.”

That perception was also echoed by New York curator and advisor Matthew Armstrong, who bought a secondary market piece, an untitled work from 2003 by German painter Tim Eitel, at Leipzig/Berlin’s Eigen+Art, for around $100,000.

“We bought one thing,” said Armstrong, who works for Donald Marron’s private equity firm, Lightyear Capital, “and there are two other things in the fire. The fair is doing just fine.”

Some dealers expressed relief that the feeding frenzy is over, such as New York gallerist and Art Basel Miami Beach exhibitor Ann Freedman, the president of Knoedler & Company. “It’s not the running of the bulls anymore — it’s the strolling of the bears, and the pigs are gone," she observed. "It’s no longer all about seeing art through the lens of money, which was all wrong.”

A number of exhibitors simply registered amazement at how well their wares had fared.

“I expected a total disaster and came down here totally depressed,” said Lisa Spellman of Chelsea’s 303 Gallery. “But we’ve had really good sales of large, complicated works, so there’s no flight to safety, as some have predicted.”

Spellman acknowledged that “we’ll give collectors we know a bigger discount than we would have a year ago, but it’s not a souk.”

Among the works that sold at 303, all of which were made specifically for the fair, were New York artist Doug Aitken’s neon light box in three interlinked sections from an edition of 4, Start Swimming, which depicts images of a groundbreaking for a McMansion development and went for $175,000; Honkys, an 82-inch-high sculpture in stainless steel, leather, fabric, and pins of rehab pop star Amy Winehouse by Irish artist Eva Rothschild, priced at ₤18,000 ($26,500); and British duo Jane and Louise Wilson’s 86-by-69-inch C-print, Oddments Room IV, depicting a London book shop interior about to be demolished, from an edition size of 4, priced at ₤23,000.

The gallery also found buyers for Winnipeg artist Karel Funk’s acrylic on paper Untitled #33, a hyper-real view of the backside of a long-haired woman, at $90,000, and a beautifully rendered abstraction in silver leaf and acrylic on panel, Untitled by recent gallery addition Nick Mauss, which is scaled at 15 ¾-by-19 ¾ inches and went for $6,500.

“We didn’t think we’d be rotating works [from sales],” said a commerce-shocked Spellman, who also had several reserves in the $250,000 range for paintings by Mary Heilmann and Karen Kilimnik.

Activity was noted at Chelsea’s Paul Kasmin Gallery, as French artist Claude Lalanne’s bronze Ginkgo (Banc) from 1996 sold in the $90,000 range; American artist Walton Ford’s large-scale and natural history–like Housatonic Ghost Cats from 2008 in watercolor, gouache, pencil, and ink on paper, depicting mating lions on an ancient cemetery plot, went in the $400,000 range; and an 80-inch-high oil-on-linen painting by New York–based artist James Nares, What I Saw from 2008, sold for an asking price of $60,000.

Kasmin also dispatched at least one version of Kenny Scharf's Cosmic Donut (2008) from an edition of 60, for $8,000.

“People came down to Miami to get access to things that normally are gone in two seconds,” said Kasmin director Clara Ha.

Another Chelsea presence, Bortolami Gallery, managed to do some business, despite making it difficult for viewers to enter its booth because of Aaron Young’s fenceMiami — a steel hurricane fence dipped in 24-carat gold that covered the width of the stand but was bent in two places to allow patrons to pass through. It sold for $100,000 to an Italian collector, much to the disappointment of a super-famous hip-hop couple making the rounds of the fair with oversized bodyguards. The artist has agreed to make a duplicate of the 255-by-96-inch schoolyard fence for the couple, rumored to be Jay-Z and Beyoncé.

Snapshots like these might tempt one into thinking that the market has found respite from all of its economic worries and woes, for a few days at least, in sun-drenched Miami Beach.

Make no mistake, though, the correction has arrived, and it remains to be seen how far and deep it will go.

“Hopefully this reset on the market will be good for art and artists,” said New York exhibitor Sean Kelly, “but everyone has to adjust their expectations.”

Judd Tully is Editor at Large of Art+Auction.