Sotheby's Turkish Contemporary Art Sale

Mart 2009

By Colin Gleadell

The first auction to be devoted to modern and contemporary Turkish art was held by Sotheby's in London last week. Planned a year ago in better times, the reasoning behind the sale was sound. Auction sales within Turkey had quadrupled in the last eight years, and there had been a boom in local art institutions and young galleries. With Sotheby's opening a branch in Istanbul, which is scheduled to be Europe's capital of culture in 2010, the timing seemed to be propitious.

But the onset of the recession turned the event, which included many young artists who had never sold at auction before, into a much riskier exercise. It was nip and tuck through much of the sale as 30 per cent of lots went unsold, and half the lots that sold did so either on or below low estimates. But these were carried by some multiple-estimate prices that included the £193,250 paid for an abstract expressionist painting by Mubin Orhon, an artist who worked in Paris from the Fifties, which was the top price of the sale.

In the end the sale made £1.3 million, just within the estimate of £1.1 million to £1.6 million, a result which probably ensures that this will not be the last of its kind. While the bulk of the sale total came from 20th-century works, more recent works also performed well. Max Wigram, the London dealer who represents UK-born Mustafa Hulusi, was delighted when Hulusi's large painting, Grapes I, 2007, sold, albeit within estimate, for £18,750. "That was more than the prices I ask in the gallery" he said.