Tsuruko Yamasaki, Untitled. Sold for £200,000.
Boris Cornelissen, Specialist, Contemporary Art.
Across all departments, which lot or work had the best story behind it?
We sold two works in 2017 that I was particularly excited about, and which will hopefully contribute to addressing the gender imbalance in the art market. The first one was a painting by Tsuruko Yamazaki, a lesser known female member of the Japanese Gutai group, that we sold in March 2017. Her works from that period had never been up at auction, and the painting was conservatively estimated at £12,000–18,000. The owner had bought it as an investment for a rainy day years ago before the Gutai artists became fashionable, and like us didn’t really know its value but felt it was the right time to sell. It went on to make £200,000 – more than four times the previous record for the artist.
The other work was by an artist called Evelyne Axell, who has never sold outside of Belgium. I came across her work in a valuation and noticed that the
Tate Modern
had bought one of her works the year before. I asked the Belgian team if they knew of any works that we could go after, hoping it might be a market we could build up and take a strong position in. Within a month they came back with one of the artist’s better early works, and we finally convinced the owner to sell by putting the work on the cover of the catalogue of our Contemporary Curated sale in November, where it sold for £100,000 on an estimate of £40,000 – 60,000.
Both these sales demonstrate how strong our influence can be in developing an artist’s market, but also how underrepresented (and undervalued) many female artists are compared to their male contemporaries.
We are now inviting consignments for our upcoming auctions.
