Sotheby's Breaks Record with Aboriginal Art

Thursday, 26 July 2007 22:12

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - Sotheby’s made Aboriginal art history with the most successful Aboriginal auction ever held. The final total was a spectacular $8,207,940 breaking the record set in July 2003 of $6,950,000 at Sotheby’s “Fitzroy” auction.

Tim Klingender, head of Sotheby’s Australian Aboriginal Art department, said: “We are absolutely thrilled with the enormous, unprecedented success of tonight’s sale. The atmosphere was electric, with standing room only and paddles being waved from all corners of the room. Sotheby’s broke the record for Aboriginal art at auction, set more than twenty new individual artists records, including Clifford Possum. This historic auction reconfirms Sotheby’s position as Australia’s leading auction house and the respect for which the field of Aboriginal art is viewed both in Australia and internationally.”

Clifford Possum’s Warlugulong sold for $2,400,000 million – breaking the record of $1.056m for an Aboriginal painting at auction, and the artist’s own record of $411,750 for Man’s Love Story 1993-1994, set by Sotheby’s in 2005. Tommy Lowry Tjapaltjarri’s most acclaimed work, Two Men Dreaming at Kuluntjarranya, 1984, was extremely well contested and sold for $576,000, breaking the artist’s record of $23,000. Gordon Bennett’s Possession Island achieved $384,000, breaking the Bennett record of $47,500 achieved by Sotheby’s in 2002 for Haptic Painting Explorer (The Inland Sea) 1993. This price establishes Bennett as one of Australia’s most important, respected, and valued contemporary Australian artists.