Preparation for another season is underway at auction houses. Ensuring that sales events continue even during the pandemic, Christie’s is holding a single-lot sale in Hong Kong dedicated to a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat on March 23.
The painting, titled Warrior, is from 1982, Basquiat’s most coveted year, and is estimated to garner between HK$240 million and HK$320 million ($31 million to $41 million). Christie’s co-head of postwar and contemporary art, Cristian Albu, stated that the work, which carries a third-party guarantee, is expected to become the most expensive by a Western artist ever to be sold in Asia. He added that the auction house was particularly encouraged by last year’s results, which saw a wide net of Asian buyers bidding on work spanning the 20th century, as well as a new world record set for George Condo in Hong Kong in July.
“Collectors are increasingly making links between traditional artists and Western art history,” Albu says. “I think it’s so important to broaden that idea of building the collection and understanding that Sanyu also gets inspired by Matisse, or that Zao Wou-Ki gets inspired by Soulages and the artists in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Warrior, which depicts a full-length figure with sword in hand, last sold at Sotheby’s London in 2012 for $8.7 million and has been in the same collection ever since. Prior to that, it had an active decade on the market, having traded hands three times in seven years. During that time, its price climbed close to 450 percent.
The single-lot sale in Hong Kong will kick off for a five-hour marathon day of sales that will be digitally streamed and continues in London with Christie’s 20th-century art evening sale and surrealist art evening sale.
The sale will begin at 2 p.m. London time (10 p.m. in Hong Kong, 9 a.m. in New York) with the hopes that Asian buyers will stay awake and active throughout the evening. According to Albu, Hong Kong sales tend to draw a whole gamut of Asian collectors. “I was on the ground for that sale, and the whole web of collectors goes from Taiwan to China, to Hong Kong, to South Korea, to Japan, to Malaysia, Indonesia, to Singapore,” he says.
Basquiat’s Warrior will be on view at Christie’s showroom at Rockefeller Center in New York beginning next week, before it is flown to Hong Kong to be shown at Alexandra House until the sale.
