LONDON — Three years ago, her large paintings sold in a little-known gallery for about $40,000 each. In 2021, one of them was resold at a Sotheby’s auction for a record $3.1 million. Another hangs in the home of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, on Downing Street.
Flora Yukhnovich, 31, a British painter whose first solo exhibition at London’s Victoria Miro gallery opens Tuesday, is one of the art world’s most sought-after young rising stars, and her works are drawing voracious demand from collectors and speculators alike.
“The number of highly interested, serious collectors who have inquired about the work runs into the hundreds,” said Matt Carey-Williams, head of sales at Victoria Miro.
The heat in the market for Yukhnovich’s lavish semi-abstract paintings is symptomatic of the phenomenon known as ‘flipping’. When the demand for certain artists significantly exceeds the supply, those lucky enough to acquire their works through galleries can make huge profits if they put them up for auction. Galleries like to avoid this: A frothy resale market can make it difficult for artists to maintain long-lasting careers.
“The auction results do not affect the pricing strategy chosen for Flora’s work,” said Carey-Williams. Yukhnovich, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has a signature painting style that dematerializes messy Old Master subjects into swirling flecks of color. Her latest works in the Victoria Miro show are marked between $135,000 and $470,000 (£100,000 to £350,000), reflecting how the artist’s gallery prices have “risen slowly and cautiously over the past 18 months,” according to Carey-Williams .
Yukhnovich’s auction prices, on the other hand, have moved up into another realm, only encouraging more potential buyers to join the line.
The stakes for betting on young contemporary art have never been higher.
In 2014, works by artists under the age of 40 fetched $181 million at auction. Last year, they spent a record $450 million, up 275 percent from 2020, according to Artprice, a company based in France that tracks international auction sales. Eyebrows were raised during that previous froth on the market when paintings by artists like Smith, Jacob Kassay, and Oscar Murillo were flipped to make auction prices over $300,000. Recent sales room awards for Yukhnovich, Matthew Wong and Avery Singer have added an extra digit.
“The market has expanded since 2014,” said Wendy Cromwell, an art consultant in New York. “There are many more people and there is a lot of money in the system. There is competition for just a few artists and that leads to exponentially higher prices.”
Big-ticket contemporary art buyers are also getting younger, Cromwell said. A new wave of participants in their 40s, 30s and even 20s, enriched by inheritance and the tech economy, is transforming the market, she added. “There has been a juvenile tremor in terms of who is buying the work and who is distributing it,” she said.
According to Sotheby’s year-end statement, “an influx of younger, tech-savvy collectors” helped the auction house achieve record sales of $7.3 billion in 2021, with the number of under-40 bidders growing 187 percent.
Given the market’s emphasis on youth and technology, it’s no surprise that Instagram has been the primary driver of Yukhnovich’s work, as is the case with so many contemporary artists.
“I came across Flora on Instagram and I certainly wasn’t alone,” said Matt Watkins, director of the Parafin gallery in London, which held a groundbreaking solo exhibition of Yukhnovich’s paintings in 2019. Influencers such as Carey-Williams and the young art historian Katy Hessel, whose account for big women has 250,000 followers, were the first big fans, as was ArtForum’s Instagram account, which has 1.2 million followers.
“That gave her enormous visibility. Instagram was the most important thing,” Watkins said.
The subsequent seven-figure auction prices have also given Yukhnovich a lot of attention, as has the artist’s move to the Victoria Miro Gallery, with its international client list and list of global art stars.
Carey-Williams said Victoria Miro would only sell Yukhnovich’s works to “considered collectors where both the gallery and the artist are confident that any purchase will last for the long haul”.
The approach reflects the tightly controlled representation of highly regarded Los Angeles-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby, who prioritizes sales to public museums to enhance Crosby’s critical reputation and exclude profiteers. For the past six years, Victoria Miro has placed works by Crosby at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; tat; and other institutions. According to Artprice, no major recent work by this sought-after artist has been resold at auction since 2018.
“By restricting access to new work, the auction market is extinguished. There’s no momentum,” said Cromwell, the art consultant, adding that many buyers who manage to acquire new work from in-demand artists now have to sign agreements requiring them to decline the source gallery first if they wish. to sell.
With dealers in the Americas and Europe determined to restrict sales of the most sought-after young art to established collections, new buyers need to look further afield.
Ghana in particular is seen as a hotspot for emerging talent. Last year, works by one of the country’s foremost young artists, Amoako Boafo, sold at auction for a staggering $3.4 million, at gallery prices of just $10,000.
“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” said Victoria Cooke, the director of Gallery 1957, a dealer in Ghana’s capital, Accra, that represents local artists and exhibits internationally. “Even during the pandemic, there were collectors and gallerists here from Paris, the US and the UK. A lot of people are trying to go straight to the source,” she said, adding that buyers were “a mixture of collectors and speculators.”
“People can come in and buy a studio here and turn the works around,” Cooke said. “That can seem like an exciting opportunity if you don’t have a trusted person to advise you otherwise.”
With only two major dealers in Accra (the other being contemporary art gallery ADA) serving as gatekeepers to Ghana’s talent, the budding artists have turned to an international auction house to reach a – hopefully – less sketchy clientele .
In January Phillips, in his role as broker of private sales, rather than public auctioneer, hosted the 10-day “Birds of a Feather” sales exhibition at its London headquarters. Featuring 18 recent works by six virtually unknown young artists from Ghana, this rare venture of an auction house in the gallery-dominated “primary market” was held in collaboration with Artemartis, an artist collective based in Accra. All of the works sold for prices ranging from $4,000 to $12,200, according to Anna Chapman, a Phillips spokeswoman, though she declined to release further information about those private sales.
“A lot of people come to Ghana to work with artists,” said Selasie Gomado, the founder of Artemartis, who acts as dealer and manager of the collective. “We teach them the importance of contractual agreements so that they can have a long, sustainable career. An artist can get a lot of attention and end up with nothing at the end of the day.”
Buyers of those modestly priced works by young Ghanaian artists at Phillips may or may not intend to turn them over. But those who are lucky enough to have bought Yukhnovich’s works at a similar early stage of her career continue to make money. A painting included in the artist’s master’s degree, in 2017, is estimated to sell for a staggering $470,000 Tuesday at Christie’s. The next day, at Sotheby’s, a 2020 work has a high estimate of $270,000.
Like it or not, it’s this kind of winning bet on young talent, just like art itself, that draws so many people to the contemporary art world.
