Frieze London Receipts: Hirst’s Tulips and Goddard’s Snails

Galleries were largely upbeat about sales on opening day. What sold in the tent at Regent's Park, and for how much?

Fairgoers responded to Gagosian's booth at Frieze London the way people typically react to an old joke: What's better than roses on your piano? Tulips on my organ.

Distasteful is how some described Damien Hirst's brightly coloured paintings of flowers—including tulips—spattered with flicks of paint. Such appraisals have hardly hurt Hirst in the past, and sure enough, shortly after opening the entire booth had been sold for ballpark prices ranging from U.S. $450,000 to $900,000.

'Day one of the Frieze art fair, 20 years after it began, is as active and engaging as we could imagine,' said Millicent Wilner, a Senior Director at Gagosian, in a statement.

Other galleries Ocula Magazine spoke to also reported strong sales.

Thaddaeus Ropac said they were pleased to present works by younger artists, as has been tradition at Frieze.

They sold four oil-and-acrylic collage-and-silkscreen paintings by Malaysian artist Mandy El-Sayegh (born 1985), in a display that broke free of the canvas to cover the booth's exterior walls. Her work Net-Grid (venezuelan thousands) (2023) sold for U.S. $115,000. They also sold paintings by Canadian artist Megan Rooney (born 1987) for around €25,000 ($26,000) each.

Ropac's booth also included established artists, with Tony Cragg's stainless steel sculpture Incident (Solo) (2022) selling for €325,000 ($345,000), and Georg Baselitz's painting Besuch in Dinard (2023) selling for €1.2 million.

Sales highlights at Lehmann Maupin included a wall sculpture by Teresita Fernández for $300,000 and the copper panel work Restin' Our Heart (2023) by Nari Ward for $250,000. They had also sold nine paintings before 5pm on opening day, including a new work by Tammy Nguyen for U.S. $100,000 that they said went to 'a prominent collector who is on the Tate board'.

Timothy Taylor said they sold 'the majority' of 22 framed works by Eddie Martinez for prices ranging from U.S. $12,000–$40,000 in a fantastic booth wallpapered with 2,362 sketches by the artist.

Among other top sales prices, Artnet News reported that Goodman Gallery sold an El Anatsui work for $1.9 million following the opening of his Turbine Hall Commission at Tate Modern, and Tracey Emin paintings sold at White Cube and Xavier Hufkens for £1.2 million ($1.47 million) and £900,000 ($1.1 million).

In the first few hours of the fair, New Delhi's Nature Morte gallery sold 80 percent of their booth, which included Sagarika Sundram's striking wool, silk, and bamboo-silk hanging Siren (2023) as well as bronze cacti by Suhasini Kejriwal, which also appeared outside the tent and scaled up for Frieze Sculpture.

Despite their success in London, Nature Morte's Aparajita Jain said the gallery would not be attending Paris+ par Art Basel (20–22 October). She pointed out that none of the great galleries from the world's most populous country have been accepted into the fair.

That could be a blessing given the city's bed bug outbreak, which has also caused some here in London to refrain from sitting on trains. Given the hysteria, it was bold of London's Seventeen Gallery to infest their booth with another pest—1,000 resin snails by Patrick Goddard.

Testament to the strength of sales at Frieze London this year—despite a cooling of the art market more broadly—even the snails sold for £25,000 ($30,000).

Frieze London continues through 15 October. —[O]