Pino Pascali’s playful Code di Delfino (tail of a dolphin) proved irresistible at Christie’s Italian Sale last night (6 October), where it sold for a record £2.2m (£2.6m with fees). The work topped the 59-lot sale, which achieved a total of £15.4m (£18.7m with premium) from 76% of lots sold, 73% by value.
The Arte Povera artist died aged only 32, so his output is small. But Pascali is a favourite of Christie’s Mariolina Bassetti, the chairman and head of post-war and contemporary art, Italy, who has frequently made him the cover star for her previous sales, resulting in three artist records.
The nationality of the buyer of Pascali’s work was undisclosed, but bidding overall was from 41 countries, proof, thinks Bassetti, of a “truly internationalised” market for Italian art. This sale was “projecting forward” Bassetti said, offering largely post-war and contemporary works with few pieces by early 20th-century heavy-weights such as Giorgio Morandi or Giorgio de Chirico, part of a desire to “teach an international audience about a new set of artists”. Among these were female artists, with works by Giosetta Fioroni and Carol Rama making two of the seven records.
The sale’s two major flops were Alberto Burri’s Nero Legno (est £1.8m-2.5m) and Alighiero Boetti’s vivid embroidery on canvas, Tutto (est £1.8m-2.2m). Take up for Boetti overall was patchy. “I undervalued that he needs time to grow. It was a masterpiece but perhaps we were aggressive on the estimate” said Bassetti, adding that he “suffered from some absence” of collectors who have been driving his market. Chinese bidders, who have been buying Boetti, Fontana and Pistoletto, were notably absent.
Among the nine pieces by Lucio Fontana in the sale, which included three ceramics, only two were his famous slash works. Prices were solid, with four Fontanas in the top ten, led by the slash painting Concetto Spaziale Attese (1966) at £1.2m (£1.4m).
Just behind was a strong price for Enrico Castellani’s Untitled (Superficie bianca e rosa), sold for £1.1m (£1.4m) against an estimate of £400,000-600,000 to the London dealer Marco Voena of Robilant + Voena, buying on behalf of an Italian collector. Fresh to the market having been on museum loan for many years, the work was both desirably early (from 1962) and unusually experimental.
Overall, this year’s sale was down on a particularly strong event in October 2015, when 90% of lots sold for £43.2m (including premium), the highest-ever total for an Italian sale and £7.6m more than the post-war and contemporary evening sale the same night.
