Galleries - October 2019

and selling all within or above estimates between £5,000 and £25,000. The ever popular John Piper, with whom Sutherland is often paired, will be on at least five stands at the British Art Fair (3–6 Oct ) with exhibitor Kynance Fine Art showing one of his last paintings looking skywards through the trees in his garden at Fawley Bottom. It has been another good year for British Pop with strong prices for Peter Phillips, Gerald Laing, Anthony Donaldson, and especially Derek Boshier whose record leaped from £12,500 to £237,500. Sculptures by Laing and Eduardo Paolozzi, the founder of British Pop, are held by Robert Bowman while pictures by R B Kitaj are stocked by galleries including Waterhouse & Dodd and Piano Nobile. A market to watch is the British Constructivists – an underrated group of geometric abstract artists who are beginning to feature in the salerooms. Records have been broken for numerous exponents including Mary Martin, Jeffrey Steele and Bill Culbert. The leading figure, Victor Pasmore, has witnessed strong prices throughout the year; his prints are stocked by Dominic Kemp and Gwen Hughes and his originals by Osborne Samuel. A major exhibition opening on 19 October at Hepworth Wakefield looks at the influence Alan Davie had on David Hockney in his early years. Davie was prolific, but the majority of his paintings do find buyers at auction – over 80 per cent in the last year, even though none were from the top drawer. Also stocking Davie is Richard Green, Askew Art and Long & Ryle with much later work. Among buyers for Davie’s work has been Damien Hirst who recently showed off his Davies at his Newport Street Gallery in London. Less easy to pigeonhole is the highly rated but undervalued Prunella Clough. Fewer of her works appear at auction, her record £97,250 being set back in 2008. But those that do sell, tend to find buyers within her small but discriminate fan club. More may be added following her first exhibition in New York this spring, and more again could be added after Gwen Hughes presents a mini retrospective to mark the centenary of her birth, with 20 prints, paintings and works on paper that span her career. An exhibition 'Cutting Edge' at the Dulwich Picture Gallery co- curated by Osborne Samuel this year highlighted the energetic, futuristic prints of the Grosvenor School. The market for prints by Cyril Power, Sybil Andrews et al peaked a few years ago, and then came down to earth after two of the principal collectors died. This has been reflected in auction sales this year, and collectors will be relieved to see prices at specialist galleries like Redfern and Osborne Samuel have stabilised. Dedicated auctions of Modern British, Irish and Scottish art notched up over £100 million in the last 12 months in the UK. Another group at an interesting point in their market evolution is the Young British Artists, spotlighted at auction on several occasions in the last two years. Interestingly, only Angus Fairhurst from this group has fetched a record price this year, but that was probably because his prices had previously lagged so far behind. The others have seen higher levels of demand in the past which is all the more reason to expect that their time will come back sooner than later. The YBAs in the broadest sense have yet to be fully appraised historically. OCTOBER 2019 GALLERIES 7 top of the british pops myba active cutting edge futures From the top: Elisabeth Frink ‘Goggle Head’ Beaux Arts London Peter Lanyon ‘Standing Stones’ Belgrave St Ives Alan Reynolds ‘Forms on an Ovoid Ground’ Osborne Samuel Images of artwork shown above are examples of representative work and not referenced in the text