Posting over the next few days will be sporadic, if at all as I wrap up some appraisal work and prepare for my son's wedding on Saturday. Then should be back on schedule the following week up until I head to NYC and the AAA conference at the end of the month. If you have not registered, time is running out. More info is on the AAA website, CLICK HERE to visit.
As appraisers we need to stay current with trends in the many different segments in the art market. We can do that in numerous ways, some through observing sales at auctions and fairs as well as watching trade publications. artnet news just published an interesting article on the strength of the African Contemporary art market and a review of the 1-54 fair in London. Take a few minutes to read and follow the link for additional content.
artnet news reports
Source: artnet newsArt collectors love to be ahead of the curve, especially when a market is “emerging.” African contemporary art is in demand but prices are still within the reach of even new collectors. In London, the sixth edition of the pioneering African art fair 1-54 attracted new and established collectors as well as curators from prestigious institutions such as LACMA, the Guggenheim, and Foundation Louis Vuitton. Celebrities drawn to the event included the actor Idris Elba.
Around 18,000 fairgoers flocked to Somerset House during Frieze week in the hope of discovering artists, some of whom might become market darlings, or even superstars. The Nigerian artist Ben Enwonwu, who showed at the fair in the past, saw his auction price soar when his so-called “African Mona Lisa” painting fetched $1.67 million at Bonhams in February.
Speaking at the fair, Othman Lazraq, the president of Morocco’s new museum of African contemporary art, MACAAL, and director of the city’s cultural nonprofit, Fondation Alliances, told artnet News that collectors should be buying because of passion. He acknowledges that it can be a sound investment, however. “People who bought African art a long time ago are really lucky because the market is now established,” he said. “African contemporary art is not a trend” he stressed. “It is here to stay.”
Lazraq, who is on Tate’s African art acquisition committee, comes from a family of collectors. When his father, the property mogul Alami Lazraq, began collecting contemporary African art 15 years ago, there were just a few galleries dealing in art from the continent, and none specializing entirely in contemporary African art. Today it is a different story. At the fair, 43 galleries from Africa, Europe and North America presented works by more than 130 artists based on all three continents and beyond.
Lazraq was acquiring work for MACAAL on the opening day of the fair, and picked up a 2017 painting by Joy Labinjo, a young British artist with Nigerian heritage, for around £7,000 (around $9,000) from Tiwani Contemporary—which he points out was one of the first galleries to show US artist Kerry James Marshall, who was in London last week for his show at David Zwirner.
The fair has grown with the market. Launched in 2013, 1-54 now has a Marrakech edition and is expanding in New York, relocating from Brooklyn to a venue in Manhattan’s West Village for its fifth anniversary in May 2019. It has also launched artists’ international careers. The British-Caribbean sculptor Zak Ové’s 2016 courtyard installation, Black and Blue: The Invisible Men and the Masque of Blackness sold from the fair for £300,000 ($391,000), and the UK-based Vigo Gallery was showing his work this year next to the most expensive work in the fair, a £1 million ($1.3 million) painting by Ibrahim El-Salahi, whose work is in the collections of MoMA, the Met, and the Tate. The Sudanese artist was presenting his first foray into sculpture in the courtyard this year, the three trees were a talking point of the fair just like Ové’s installation was two years ago. Editions of Ovés invisible men are now on show in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza and Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the North of England.
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