8 Artists Who Had Breakout Moments at Auction This Fall

By Benjamin Sutton

This fall auction season has been anything but business as usual. Unmoored from the usual calendar of sales by the pandemic, resulting economic downturn, and unease in anticipation of the United States presidential election, auction houses Christie’s, Phillips, and Sotheby’s packed most of their contemporary art auctions across Hong Kong, London, and New York into a single month starting in late September, with mixed results.

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Firenze Lai

Firenze Lai, The Colleagues, 2017. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

The Hong Kong–based painter Firenze Lai’s work made its auction debut this summer and has hit the auction block three more times since, selling each time for at least double the high estimate. That first lot, Happily Ever After (2013)—in which a couple, arms interlocked, walks through an ominous, purgatorial landscape of dark reds and purples—achieved HK$2.6 million (US$338,000) against a high estimate of HK$1.2 million (US$154,000). Earlier this month, her large painting The Colleagues (2017) kicked off Sotheby’s contemporary art evening sale in Hong Kong. The melancholy composition, a largely black-and-white interior scene featuring two figures embracing and edged in streaks of purple, yellow, and blue, eclipsed its high estimate—HK$1.2 million again—and eventually sold for HK$3 million (US$390,000), smashing that earlier record for Lai’s work.

Ayako Rokkaku

Ayako Rokkaku, Untitled, 2017. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

The self-taught Japanese artist Ayako Rokkaku has built a devoted following among collectors with her paintings featuring female figures in colorful, sometimes flower-filled compositions. While the imagery sometimes evokes the superflat stylings of Takashi Murakami and Mr., Rokkaku’s technique of applying paint with her bare hands and fingers gives the work greater levels of texture and gestural detail. Though her work first appeared at auction back in 2007, there has been a significant uptick in the number of lots offered since 2018—when her work was featured in a three-artist selling exhibition at Phillips in Hong Kong, and presented by her gallery, Amsterdam’s Gallery Delaive, at ComplexCon, the Los Angeles festival and conference.

That accelerating secondary market has paralleled demand on Artsy, according to platform data. The number of inquiries on her works on Artsy rose dramatically from 2017 to 2018, and then nearly quintupled in 2019.

Last year, her work reached a new highwater mark at auction, when an untitled, nearly 15-foot-wide canvas from 2007 sold for HK$2.8 million (US$367,000) at an Est-Ouest Auctions Co. sale in Hong Kong. That record still stands, but Sotheby’s came within spitting distance earlier this month, when an untitled Rokkaku painting from 2017, featuring a frowning female figure nearly submerged in colorful vegetation, eclipsed its high estimate of HK$400,000 (US$51,000) to sell for HK$2.7 million (US$357,000)...READ MORE