Amory Week Sales Mixed

Kelly Crow reporting for the Wall Street Journal states sales have been mixed at this weeks contemporary art fairs and satellite shows during Armory Week.  She mentions prices of art above $500,000.00 are few and far between, and some of the lesser known galleries have had a hard go of it.  But the expectations, especially when compared to last years event remain positive and upbeat.

Crow reports

Organizers expect 60,000 people to attend the fair, up from 56,000 last year. The turnout at Wednesday's VIP preview included such celebrities as Kyra Sedgwick, Sofia Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, along with major New York collectors like Susan and Michael Hort. The Horts paid dealer Daniel Reich $15,600 for an untitled portrait of a young man by painter Paul P.

Earlier this week, New York's Nicholas Robinson Gallery sold nine canvases by Wei Dong, who paints cheeky nudes into Old Master-style interiors. Asante International, a Swiss art foundation, paid roughly $720,000 for the works. Geneva-based dealer Laura Gowen also sold at least 25 paintings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Ghana-born painter whose stoic portraits evoke Alice Neel and varied in price from $3,500 to $17,000.

Ms. Gowen said her year-old gallery spent over $14,000 on fair-related fees, so she would have faced "financial disaster" if Ms. Yiadom-Boakye's paintings had gone unsold.

Also popular: Whitney Biennial artists James Casebere and Curtis Mann, whose elaborate photographs of suburbia and refugee camps sold for $48,000 and $22,000, respectively.

A number of smaller satellite fairs run concurrent to the Armory Show in New York, often highlighting work by emerging artists. Newcomers this year include fairs devoted to Dutch and Korean art, along with Independent New York, which takes over the former Dia Gallery space in Chelsea.

To read the full WSJ article, click HERE.