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A stock exchange for art announced its launch in London this week, aiming to make art a more accessible investment prospect. Called Artex, the new exchange — regulated by the Liechtenstein Financial Market Authority with an EU licence — opens with the listing of Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer” (1963), which Artex has valued at about $55mn. The work has been consigned by a private collector who bought it from Christie’s for $51.8mn with fees in 2017.
Artex will initially offer 70 per cent of the work (worth $38.5mn) in shares equivalent to $100 each, though more will come as its owner can only keep up to 10 per cent, confirms Yassir Benjelloun-Touimi, co-founder and chief executive of Artex and a former investment banker. Pre-marketing is set to begin officially on June 19 and public trading starts on July 21. Artex will take 3 per cent of the work’s valuation and will also make a “small fee” from each trade, Benjelloun-Touimi says. Other works will come to market, with their frequency “depending on the response”, he says.
This is not the first attempt to divide art into tradeable chunks — and so far the jury is still out on such projects, which have yet to attract enough liquidity to succeed and can invite shortlived speculation. Benjelloun-Touimi says that Artex’s regulated framework dictates “transparency and non-discrimination”, making it a viable option for institutional investors. He accepts that “art is not oil, it is not a commodity” and is committed to having the works Artex offers on view in public museums, rather than, for example, kept in a freeport. When it comes to speculation, he says, “you can limit it but you can’t stop it in any asset — it is ingrained in human nature”.
Christie’s will offer a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting of Picasso, estimated at between £4.5mn and £6.5mn, in London on June 28. The 1984 work is painted on metal with “Pablo Picasso” written in capital letters seven times, “almost like a mantra”, says Tessa Lord, Christie’s senior specialist. “There’s a continuing fascination about an artist painting an artist, particularly cross-generationally, and Basquiat and Picasso are two big ticks for us,” Lord says. The work sold at Christie’s for £1mn with fees in 2007 and was last seen in public at the Barbican’s Basquiat: Boom for Real exhibition in 2017-18, on loan from an Italian private collection.
Christie’s scored a hit with Basquiat in Hong Kong last weekend when his three-dimensional painting “Black” (1986) made HK$51.5mn (HK$62.6mn with fees, about $8mn). The work, which had a third-party guarantee, was the top lot of its healthy 20th/21st-century evening sale on May 28, though its final price was just below its presale estimate and the amount made at its previous sale in 2020 ($8.1mn, not accounting for inflation).
The third London Gallery Weekend runs between June 2 and June 4 and, with 123 galleries participating in 135 venues across town this year, is the biggest free-to-visit gallery event in the world. Train strikes planned on Friday and Saturday might deter those from outside the capital, but for those in London already, there is a boosted programme of more than 100 public events, performances and expert-led live tours.
The event is grouped across four areas of London — Central, West, East and South — with the Central area by far the largest (87 venues). For those outside the city, this makes the event more vital. “Galleries in Mayfair almost operate as a different industry from those elsewhere, especially in Peckham, for example, and the gap is getting bigger,” says Alexandra Warder, co-founder of south London’s Bosse & Baum. “But London Gallery Weekend is designed and built by galleries, so they are sensitive about who it is for.” Warder’s gallery opens a solo show of the Czech artist Kateřina Šedá, who brings an extension of a series made for care homes in Austria and Slovakia (2019-21). This turns residents’ former homes into wooden sculptures that are also birdhouses (priced between £10,000 and £30,000).
The estate of the German-French artist Hans Arp (1886-1966) has given 200 plaster sculptures to 10 museums worldwide, including the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, the Hepworth Wakefield in the UK and Vienna’s Albertina. The donation also includes two bronzes for each institution, the foundation confirms. The plasters, which Arp finalised before handing them over to foundries for fabrication, are “invaluable resources” towards understanding the artist’s process, says Engelbert Büning, director of the foundation. The gift and associated collaboration, which targets institutions that don’t have Arp works, stretches to Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, while Büning says plans are afoot to add museums in Asia and Africa.
Arp was a co-founder of the Dada movement, which rejected traditional definitions of art after the horrors of the first world war, and his often amorphous work reflects the fluidity of national and cultural identity. Born in Alsace, Arp was originally German but, after the war, became French with the region. He used two first names — Hans and Jean — to reflect his mixed nationality.
Copenhagen’s Chart Art Fair has extended its outdoor sculpture show in the city’s Tivoli Gardens amusement park to run a month every year until 2025. This year it has 15 works on the slate for August 24-September 24, all of which are for sale via galleries with artists including Sylvie Fleury and Jonathan Meese. “The feedback from the first year was so good, people saw it as a bit of a treasure hunt,” says the fair’s new director, Julie Quottrup Silbermann.
This year, she has organised for the 37 galleries in the coinciding fair (August 24-27) to select one work each priced below DKr20,000 ($2,900), for a group show at the entrance of the Kunsthal Charlottenborg. “Collecting art supports the wider ecosystem but we don’t talk about it in that way so much. At the same time, people often ask how to start collecting,” Silbermann says, adding that the talks programme will addresses first-time art-buyers too.
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