art Market News: scandal sells

Market News: scandal sells
Sotheby’s prepares to sell the inventory of disgraced art dealer Helge Achenbach and an exhibition curated via Instagram opens on Bond Street, in this week’s art market news
Colin Gleadell
By Colin Gleadell
June 22, 2015 17:50
Kasper Sonne, TXC84, 2014 Kasper Sonne, TXC84, 2014

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Ripples of a major art world scandal in Germany are to be felt in London next week as Sotheby’s offers 17 contemporary works from “the inventory of Achenbach Consulting,” the leading German art consultancy run by Helge Achenbach who was convicted of overcharging his clients and sentenced to six years in prison earlier this year. Declared insolvent, over 2,000 works from Achenbach’s stock were sold last week in Germany for some €6.5 million (£4.6 million), and the London sales are estimated to raise another £550,000. Most of the works at Sotheby’s were acquired through established dealers, and some at auction. Thomas Struth’s photograph of visitors to the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence was bought for £49,250 in a 2012 sale to raise money for the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, and is now re-offered with a £30,000 to £40,000 estimate.

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Fatima and Eskander Maleki are known as among the leading private collectors of contemporary art in the UK. Now their eldest son, Kamiar – who runs an events business, began collecting ten years ago, and owns works by such rising stars as Oscar Murillo, Ryan Estep and Chris Succo – is about to curate his first exhibition. The works are not from his collection, but are by a young generation of abstract painters in their thirties whose work he has discovered on Instagram. “The biggest audience for art is online, now,” says Maleki. “While there is no substitute for first-hand experience, it is incredible how social media is transforming the art world. Instagram is the best for art images,” he says, “if you know who to follow”. The title of the exhibition, to open at the Ronchini Gallery off Bond Street on July 1 is Hashtag Abstract, and will include paintings by Chris Kuhn, Kasper Sonne, Oliver Clegg and Richard Hoglund priced between $5,000 and $24,000.

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A landscape by Cezanne that was owned by the family of Samuel Courtauld and on loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge until February, when it was sold at Christie’s for £13.5 million, will be exported to America unless a British buyer can match the price. At the auction it was bought by American art advisor, Nancy Whyte, outbidding American dealer, William Acquavella, though her client was not identified.

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With London’s Old Master sales looming, photography dealers Beetles + Huxley had the idea to organise an exhibition of contemporary photographs that look like 17th century Dutch still life paintings, one of the more popular genres on the market. Step forward Paulette Tavormina, previously a prop and food stylist in Hollywood and then a photographer of works of art for Sotheby’s in New York, whose first exhibition in London opens next Tuesday. Tavormina can spend an entire week arranging tableaux and photographing one image. Printed in three different sizes and in small editions of five or seven, a typical example such as Crabs and Lemon after PC (presumably a reference to the painter Pieter Claesz) can be bought from between £3,000 and £5,300.