At long last, Frieze Seoul launched its first edition this week, and on the fair’s first day, some participating galleries said they’d sold a few works for more than $1 million. By that measure, the fair has been a success for at least a few of the world’s biggest galleries.
Most of the other sales that galleries reported were much lower than $1 million, however, which means that Frieze Seoul is not commanding purchases on the order of another Asian competitor, Art Basel Hong Kong, where prices can sometimes exceed $10 million. Still, galleries said they’d sold to Korean and Chinese collectors, which could mean that interest in the powerful art scenes of those two countries is strong.
It’s worth reminding that it is difficult to independently verify the sales that gallery report as having taken place at art fairs, and that in some cases these purchases are often conducted in advance and only announced later on, once events kick off. Frieze runs through Monday, which could mean more big transactions are still to come.
Below, a look at seven works that galleries said sold during Frieze’s VIP preview on Friday.
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George Condo at Hauser & Wirth, $2.8M
Image Credit: Photo Thomas Barratt/©George Condo/Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Interest in George Condo’s Picasso-inspired paintings has always been strong in certain parts of Asia. In 2021, the Long Museum in Shanghai gave Condo one of his largest surveys to date, with more than 200 works on view, and in 2020, one of his paintings sold for $6.58 million at a Christie’s Hong Kong auction, setting an auction record for him.
Condo fever continued at Frieze Seoul, where Hauser & Wirth reportedly sold his 2022 painting Red Painting Composition for $2.8 million to a private museum in South Korea. Which one is it? Good luck finding out, since South Korea has the most private museums out of any country in the world, according to a 2016 report. Hauser & Wirth also reported having sold a new Mark Bradford painting for $1.8 million.
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George Condo at Sprüth Magers, $1.5M
Image Credit: Courtesy Sprüth Magers Sprüth Magers also said it felt the fervor for Condo, with his 2022 painting Smiling Profile selling for $1.5 million to a Chinese collector. As with many works by Condo, this one draws on Picasso’s multi-perspectival portraits to offer up a knot of teeth, eyes, and hair. If galleries’ sales reports are to be believed, with this one plus Hauser & Wirth’s alone, Condo’s work brought in $4.3 million on Frieze Seoul’s opening day.
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Adam Pendleton at Pace Gallery, $475K
Image Credit: © Adam Pendleton/Courtesy Pace Gallery Not many other works sold for prices that even approached the Condos or the Bradford, but some other galleries said they still managed to move artworks that likely rank among the top sums ever for their respective artists. Pace Gallery reported having sold Adam Pendleton’s 2022 painting Untitled (WE ARE NOT) for $475,000, which is a little $30,000 shy of his auction record. It’s a similar work to ones that appeared at his 2021 Museum of Modern Art show, for which he filled the institution’s entire second-floor atrium, and it’s an example of the way Pendleton renders ambiguous textual phrases in ways that, as he once put it, are “not black or white.”
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Joel Mesler at LGDR
New York’s LGDR gallery said that by the end of the day on Friday, all of the Joel Mesler paintings it had brought to its booth were sold or placed on reserve with a buyer. His paintings often feature short phrases that are set within bombastically colored patterning. Those works, the gallery said, had all been valued at between $25,000 and $175,000. Still, the upper end of that range is only a fraction of the $907,200 brought in following the sale of a Mesler painting at Christie’s New York earlier this year.
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Lee Bul at Lehmann Maupin, $260K
Image Credit: Photo Jeon Byung-cheol/Courtesy the artist Many Western galleries chose to spotlight Western artists at Frieze Seoul, and Lehmann Maupin, which opened its Seoul gallery in 2017, beating others based in the U.S. by several years, largely fell in line with that trend. Still, it gave considerable space to a couple South Korean artists on its roster, Lee Bul and Do Ho Suh.
Lee’s works were among the top-selling pieces within the booth, according to the gallery, with her 2022 painting Perdu CXLIII selling for $260,000. Other from the same series reportedly went for $190,000 a pop at Lehmann Maupin and Thaddaeus Ropac’s booths.
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Tom Sachs at Thaddaeus Ropac, $300K
Image Credit: ©Tom Sachs/Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac, London, Paris, Salzburg, and Seoul Thaddaeus Ropac said it had found a buyer for Tom Sachs’s Fun Town (2021), a painting of a rocket whose body is formed from two Budweiser beer cans. The rocket’s nose is emblazoned with the logo for Trojan condoms, which is not exactly the most subtle gesture. But the attention-grabbing quality of that entendre seems to have paid off, with the piece reportedly having been bought for $300,000. That’s just $2,000 below Sachs’s auction record, which was set earlier this year during a marquee Christie’s sale in May.
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Sterling Ruby at Xavier Hufkens
Image Credit: Photo Robert Wedemeyer/Courtesy the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels Brussels’s Xavier Hufkens gallery gave over its entire booth to Sterling Ruby, and it said that by the end of the day on Friday, every single work in it had found a buyer. Priced at between $375,000 and $475,000, these new abstractions form a series known as “TURBINE,” whose materials are scattered across these large-scale canvases in a way that is intended to recall the aftereffects of a gust of wind.