Christie’s London Evening Sales Bank £196.7m

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Christie's 20th / 21st Century: London Evening Sale and The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale together brought in £196.7m (U.S. $250.4m) last night.

The result bested last year's sales, but didn't reach white glove status, with 87% of works sold by lot.

The most lucrative work was René Magritte's L'ami intime (The Intimate Friend) (1958), which sold for £33.7m ($43.2 million).

Three other works sold for over £10 million: Francis Bacon's Landscape near Malabata, Tangier selling for £19.6m ($25.1m), David Hockney's California (1965) for £18.7m ($24m), and Claude Monet's Matinée sur la Seine, temps net (1897) for £14.4m ($18.5m).

New auction records were set for two female artists.

The Woven Warped Garden of Ponder (2021) by unstoppable young London artist Jadé Fadojutimi sold for £1.6m ($2.1m) against an estimate of £400,000–600,000. The result edged higher than the price of Quirk my mannerism (2021), which sold for $1.9 million at Phillips' New York evening sale in November last year.

Snowglobe (2018) by Allison Katz, who was born in Montreal in 1980 and now lives in London, sold for £277,200 against an estimate of £40,000–60,000. —[O]

Main image: Christie's auctions René Magritte's L'ami intime (1958) at the 20th / 21st Century: London Evening Sale on 7 March 2024. Courtesy Christie's.