FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2007 -- Tonight’s total of £34,865,300 ($70,692,882) is the highest ever total for any October sale of Contemporary Art held in Europe, more than triple the previous highest total for an Evening Sale in this season - £9.9 ($18.7) million - achieved in 2006. Since the inception of the Frieze Art Fair in 2003, the October sales of Contemporary Art have grown from strength to strength, with tonight’s total a ten-fold leap against the 2003 total.

Francis Outred, Head of Evening Auctions, Sotheby’s London Contemporary Art department, said: “Tonight’s fantastic results are proof that the art market today is more global than at any previous time. With competition coming from a far wider range of collectors, prices for outstanding works have been
taken to yet another level. The phenomenal prices paid for works by Raqib Shaw and Yue Minjun demonstrate that the new international collecting base has developed a taste for works by artists from around the world. We feel that tonight’s figures speak for themselves and that we have been vindicated
in our decision to add a fifth major sale season to the international Contemporary Art calendar.”

Sotheby’s once again confirmed its position as global leader in the field of Chinese Contemporary Art. Yue Minjun’s Execution – arguably the artist’s most vehement, candid and politically-loaded work in the wake of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989 – smashed the record for a work of Chinese
Contemporary Art at auction and almost doubled its pre-sale low estimate of £1,500,000. Two telephone bidders tenaciously competed for the iconic work for almost six minutes, finally driving the price paid to £2,932,500 - £700,000 more than the previous record set at Sotheby’s London in June for a work by the same artist. A further six works in the sale by some of China’s most important Contemporary artists, including Zhang Xiaogang, Zeng Fanzhi and Cai Guo-Qiang also performed well, and together with the result achieved for Yue Minjun, the group realised a total of £6,388,200, almost double the pre-sale low estimate (£3,720,000-5,160,000).

Indian-born Raqib Shaw’s masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights III, sold for a phenomenal £2,708,500 ($5,491,755), establishing a new record both for the artist, and for any Indian work of art at auction. The stunning monumental work, recently exhibited at MoMA in New York, is by far the most
important work by the artist ever to have been offered at auction (the first time that a work by the artist has been included in an evening sale) and its record-breaking price tonight, after a prolonged bidding war between five bidders, is indicative of the arrival of Indian Contemporary Art on the international scene.

Andy Warhol’s Jackie, from 1964, is the outstanding example from his celebrated series, thanks to the perfect quality of its silkscreen registration. Having remained in the same private collection since it was
acquired from the Leo Castelli Gallery in the 1960s, the work tonight sold for £1,700,500 ($3,447,934) – the highest price achieved at auction for a single screenprint of Jackie.

A small work by David Hockney entitled Swimming Pool, painted during the artist’s early days in California, sold for £1,196,500 ($2,426,023) against a pre-sale estimate of just £450-550,000. The painting, which has remained in the same Italian private collection for over 30 years, had not been
recorded anywhere and hadn’t been seen in public since the Venice Biennale of 1978. Swimming Pool anticipated one of Hockney’s most iconic series of works – The Little Splash, The Splash (sold at Sotheby’s in June 2006 for £2,920,000) and A Bigger Splash (in the collection of the Tate) – and attracted six bidders at tonight’s auction.

Tonight’s sale once again demonstrated that the market for works by Banksy continues to gain momentum. The Rude Lord, one of his celebrated ‘Crude Oils’ series, was sold for £322,900 ($654,712)–a new record for the anonymous artist at auction. It was later followed by his life-size replica of Michelangelo’s David, which fetched £204,500 ($414,644).

Tags：Art   Evening   Contemporary   Sotheby   October