Last year’s Frieze week Italian sales at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s were tough acts to follow. In 2015, Sotheby’s had a record-breaking Fontana painting, Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio, which sold for £15.9m (with buyer’s premium), making up a large chunk of the £40.4m (with premium) sale total.
This year, Sotheby’s 7 October evening sale was a little more civilian, without such a superstar. It made £19.4m (£23.3 with premium), just short of a revised estimate of £19.7m-£27.9m. The top lot was Alberto Burri’s Rosso Plastica 5 from 1962, a plastic, acrylic, vinavil and combustion on canvas that sold just above its low estimate for £4.05m (£4.7m with premium) to the Greek-born, Swiss-based collector Dimitri Mavrommatis.
Salvatore Scarpitta’s “bandage painting” Forager for Plankton (1959) made a record for the Italian American artist, evidence of a reassessment in the run up to Luxembourg & Dayan’s New York exhibition of his works from his desirable mid-1950s to 1960s period, opening on 13 October. Estimated at £1m-1.5m, it sold for £1.8m (£2.2m with premium), bettering the previous high of £856,550/$1.4m (with premium) made at Christie’s New York in 2014.
Though a number of lots sold slightly under their minimum estimates, there were no major failures, as witnessed by a solid 85% sold by lot rate and 94% by value.
The auction house aims to “educate” and expand buyer’s tastes through its Italian sale. As such, the offerings are “not a normal sale, we edit very carefully” to offer a representative range by each artist, says the head of the department Claudia Dwek. Some of the heat has arguably departed the top end of the Fontana market, which many feel had become overblown this time last year, though Sotheby’s specialist Isabelle Paagman still believes there is “room at the top for both Fontana and Burri”.
However, buyers are looking for value in a second tier of artists that are not yet household names, so there is, Dwek says, a “change of focus” towards artists including Scarpitta, as well as Rome Pop period artists of the 1960s such as Fabio Mauri (1926-2009). This is in part encouraged by major shows this year such as Imagine: New Imagery in Italian art 1960-69 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, which closed in September. Mauri featured in a Sotheby’s evening sale for the first time; his Schermo Imbottito Medio (Il Generazione) “Una Tasca di Cinema” (1972), a white enamel on shaped canvas, sold at mid-estimate for £100,000 (£125,000 with premium), setting a new record for the artist.
