20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale achieves £106,925,400 / $142,852,334 / €122,750,359

As the art world turned its gaze to London for Frieze Week 2025, Christie’s 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale realised £106,925,400 / $142,852,334 / €122,750,359. This result is up 30 per cent on the total achieved last year. With a sell-through rate of 90 per cent by value and 92 per cent by lot, the result proves the auction house’s enduring role in the capital’s art market.

Presided over by auctioneers Adrien Meyer and Yü-Ge Wang, bids came in from the floor, telephones and on Christie’s LIVE for the curated selection of 60 lots — 67 per cent of which were fresh to auction. More than 56 per cent of bidders were from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, while 28 per cent came from the Americas, and 16 per cent from Asia and the Pacific.

The night’s result is Christie’s highest London Frieze Week evening sale total in seven years, signalling an increased demand for exceptional quality, impressive provenance and works fresh to the market.

Property from the Ole Faarup Collection

The top price of the night went to Peter Doig’s Ski Jacket (1994), which made £14,270,000, against a low estimate of £6,000,000. It sold after nearly 13 minutes of intense bidding to a round of applause.

Showing a mountain landscape dotted with conifers and chalets, the work was acquired by Danish collector Ole Faarup from the Gavin Brown’s Enterprise gallery in New York in the year it was made — the same as Doig’s Turner Prize nomination. Its sister painting, also titled Ski Jacket, was included in the prize exhibition and purchased by Tate the following year.

Eight more lots were offered from Faarup’s collection. The Danish furniture retailer who passed away in February this year spent five decades acquiring art, at one point in the 1990s focusing his attention on London’s emerging artists — following advice he once received from Andy Warhol to ‘buy things that are cutting-edge.’ In total, the collection raised £27,318,500, benefitting the Ole Faarup Art Foundation.

Another of his works by Doig, Country Rock (1998-99), made £9,210,000, the second highest price of the night. A panoramic three-metres-wide, it depicts the entrance to a Toronto tunnel framed by a rainbow. It was purchased by Faarup from Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin in 1999, and has been exhibited extensively. In 2008 it was used for the cover of the catalogue accompanying the artist’s mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain.

Two more works by Doig from Faarup’s collection were also on offer: an oil on plywood, Concrete Cabin (1993), and the watercolour Yara (2001), making £635,000 and £279,400 — more than double the low estimate of £120,000 — respectively. The artist’s exhibition Peter Doig: House of Music runs at London’s Serpentine Gallery until February 2026.

A portrait in oils, acrylics, glitter and elephant dung called Blossom (1997), made by the Young British Artist Chris Ofili and purchased by Faarup the same year, fetched £2,124,000 — more than double its low estimate of £1,000,000. It featured in the artist’s inaugural institutional exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The show led to Ofili becoming the first black artist to win the Turner Prize. In 2010, Blossom was also selected for the catalogue cover of the artist’s mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain.

Another highlight from Faarup’s collection was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982), an oil stick on paper of two totemic figures made in the pivotal year the artist shot to fame. It fetched £508,000. Similarly, Karin Mamma Andersson’s Hon (She), 2013, which was painted a decade after the artist’s breakthrough show as part of Nordic Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale, made £190,500.

Further works from The Ole Faarup Collection will be offered in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on 16 October, and in Among the Artists: The Ole Faarup Collection Online Sale, which is live for bidding until 21 October.

Three paintings by Lucian Freud from an important private collection

The third-highest price of the evening went to Lucian Freud, for his Self-portrait Fragment (c.1956), which fetched £7,600,000. Painted when the artist was in his early thirties, during the deterioration of his second marriage, to Lady Caroline Blackwood, it shows him touching his cheek as if in awe of the union of paint and flesh. It was acquired by the current owner from Marlborough Gallery in London in 1968.

Writing in the introduction to Freud’s four-volume catalogue raisonné published earlier this year, the author Toby Treves said: ‘We might imagine that, as he painted Self-portrait Fragment, the shock of the discovery so frightened him that he stopped work on the picture, as if he’d heard the sound of breathing come from the figure emerging on the canvas.’

It follows the top price of last October’s Evening Sale coming from Freud’s Ria, Naked Portrait (2006-07), which realised £11,810,000, highlighting a sustained demand for the artist’s works from across his career.

Two other Freud works from the same private collection as Self-portrait Fragment went under the hammer: Woman with a Tulip (1944) and Sleeping Head (1961-71), making £3,222,000 and £2,368,000.

The former shows 19-year-old Freud’s lover, the 31-year-old Lorna Wishart, in the graphic style of his early years. In a show at Lefevre Gallery in London in 1946, the critic Maurice Collis singled out the painting, writing: ‘Lucian Freud, the youngest of the young men here, shows remarkable skill. He may turn out the most gifted.’

The latter is of an unknown sitter Freud met in a bar in Soho in 1961. Closely cropped and composed of broad, sweeping strokes, its swift completion unlocked a new confidence in the artist. He later said it was ‘one of the few I did very fast: I couldn’t work now if I hadn’t worked in that way.’

Auction records

Four new auction records were set on the night — three of them by women artists.

Paula Rego’s monumental triptych, Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ (1995), formerly in the Saatchi Collection, made £3,466,000, eclipsing her previous record set at Christie’s in 2023 with the diptych Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ (1995) of £3,065,000.

Following her retrospective at the Pompidou earlier this year, Suzanne Valadon’s large, double nude Deux nus ou Le bain (1923), made £1,016,000, more than double her previous record of $475,000 set at Christie’s in 2021 for the single nude Nu à la draperie (1921).

Annie Morris’s Bronze Stack 9, Copper Blue (2015) — a rare bronze version of one of her iconic totems — made £482,600, breaking her previous record set at £327,600 by Stack 9, Copper Blue (2018) at Christie’s in London in March 2024.

Elsewhere, Esben Weile Kjær’s stained glass Aske and Johan upside down kissing in Power Play at Kunstforeningen GL STRAND (2020), also from the Faarup collection, achieved £25,400, obliterating his previous record of $1,421 set in 2024 — underscoring the appetite for emerging artists.

Impressionist, Surrealist and modern highlights

Strong results were seen for works by leading Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painters. Paul Cezanne’s view of Aix-en-Provence Maison de Bellevue et pigeonnier (c.1890) sold for £5,540,000, while his early, experimental landscape Paysage (1867), made £381,000; Paul Signac’s L’Arc-en-ciel (Venise), 1905, a kaleidoscopic, Pointillist view of Venice from the Piazza San Marco, made £4,930,000. Another maritime scene from the keen sailor, his pastel-coloured vision Marseille. Le vieux port (1906), also made £2,612,000; Claude Monet’s Printemps, saules (1885), painted shortly after the artist moved his family to Giverny, made £2,368,000; and Alfred Sisley’s bucolic landscapes Le pont de Moret-sur-Loing en été (1888) and La prairie (c.1880), achieved £1,941,000 and £609,600.

A trio of paintings by Pablo Picasso saw significant figures: Femme de profil dans un fauteuil (III), 1956, a seated portrait of his muse Jacqueline Roque made £2,978,000, while La colline de la Californie (1959) a rare post-war landscape of the view from the villa they moved to in Cannes in 1955 made £3,710,000. Chevalier, pages et moine (1951), a monochrome depiction of a knight on horseback, made £2,002,000.

The Surrealists were represented by two small works on paper by René Magritte: La veillée (The Vigil), 1961, making £812,800, and La voix du sang (Blood will tell), 1947, which made £762,000, more than double its low estimate.

Three paintings by Marc Chagall all outperformed their low estimates: Les fleurs de St Jean Cap-Ferrat ou L’arbre en fleur (1957) made £2,246,000 against £1,200,00; L’Accordéoniste dans le bec ou Ciel d’hiver (1942-49) made £1,514,000 against 1,200,000; and Les fiancés à l'ange rouge (1937-38) made £1,270,000 against £900,000.

Some of the most competitive bidding of the evening, however, was for Maurice Denis’s Avril ou Les anémones (1891), which was painted within months of the artist renting a studio with Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, who together formed Les Nabis. Nine telephone bidders drove the price past a low estimate of £600,000 to £1,697,000.

Post-War and Contemporary highlights

Kicking off the sale as lot number one, Domenico Gnoli’s hyperrealist, acrylic and sand on canvas Bouton n. 2 (Button n. 2), 1967, sold for £977,900 against a low estimate of £500,000.

Gerhard Richter’s Tulpen (Tulips), 1995, which was inspired by the Golden Age of Dutch flower painting, more than doubled its low estimate to reach £6,150,000 — the fourth highest price of the night. Dieter Schwarz, curator of a forthcoming Richter retrospective at Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton, said of the work: ‘Tulips is about what is missing, that yearning for an ideal image that can never be a reality.’

Hurvin Anderson’s Lower Lake (2005) made £3,222,000 against a low estimate of £1,500,000; George Condo’s portrait The Banker’s Wife (2011), sold for £1,331,000 against a low estimate of £800,000; Andy Warhol’s silkscreen Mao (1973) made £952,500 against a low estimate of £600,000; and Robert Mangold’s Four Color Frame Painting #16 (1985) doubled its low estimate to achieve £533,400.

Louise Bourgeois’s bronze Untitled (1950) — consigned from the collection of U2’s bass guitarist Adam Clayton — sold for £1,514,000.

For Art’s Sake: Selected Works by Tiqui Atencio & Ago Demirdjian

Four sculptures from the collection of Tiqui Atenico and her husband Ago Demirdjian were offered in the evening sale: Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinet Never Mind (1990-91) made £508,000; Antony Gormley’s steel figure Domain I (1999) sold for £469,900; Franz West’s sculpture Blue Luck (2008) achieved £285,750; and Sarah Lucas’s tights, fluff and wire Nud Cycladic 15 (2010) reached £114,300. More highlights from their collection are offered across the Day and Online sales this week in London.

London Frieze Week 20th/21st Century sales — and Spellbound: The Hegewisch Collection

The Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale takes place on 16 October, offering more than 140 lots by Thomas Schütte, Nicole Eisenman, Albert Oehlen, Alex Katz, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Howard Hodgkin, Gerhard Richter and more.

On the same day, Spellbound: The Hegewisch Collection Part I will offer works from the collection of Klaus Hegewisch, who built one of the 20th century’s leading collections of works on paper and prints spanning Old Masters including Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve (1504) and Rembrandt’s The Three Trees (1643) to modern masters such as Edvard Munch’s Melancholy III (1902) and Picasso’s Le repas frugal (1904).

On 17 October, Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Day and Works on Paper Sale contains over 150 works by Berthe Morisot, Pierre Bonnard, Maximilien Luce, Gabriele Münter, Edouard Vuillard, Eugène Boudin, Camille Pissarro, Max Ernst and more.

Over 100 lots are offered in Among the Artists: The Ole Faarup Collection Online Sale, including work by Daniel Richter, Katharina Grosse, Gary Hume and Friedrich Kunath, until 21 October. More than 170 lots are also on offer in Post-War and Contemporary Art Online, including work by Charline von Heyl, Asger Jorn, Igor Mitoraj and Harland Miller, until 22 October.

Looking further ahead, Christie’s Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale takes places on 22 October. Highlights include work by Barbara Hepworth, L.S. Lowry, Stanley Spencer and Bridget Riley. The following day, the Modern British and Irish Art Day Sale takes place.