Following the pandemic-related disruptions of 2020, 2021 marked a synthesis of old art market norms and new COVID-19-era realities. In-person events and auctions returned, yet continue to coexist alongside the new digital selling environs.
and
predictably nabbed top-dollar results on the secondary market, but upstart digital artists reached equally lucrative heights as the desire for crypto-backed NFTs (non-fungible tokens) rose to a fever pitch. In this addled landscape between tradition and innovation, a host of young and veteran players found themselves with sold-out presentations and skyrocketing auction results. These are the artists who reached new levels of success in the art market this year.
Beeple, EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, 2021. Courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd.If there’s one artist who best encapsulated the NFT feeding frenzy that shocked the art market this year, it’s Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple. At a Christie’s online auction this spring, EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS (2021), a digital composition made up of works from the artist’s 2007 “Everydays” series, went under the hammer with a starting bid of just $100. Over the following weeks, the work continued to accumulate bids, soaring to $9 million the day before the auction closed, before growing in massive leaps to an eventual hammer price of $69.34 million, a result that places Beeple firmly within the three most expensive living artists at auction, following
and
.
The astounding sale—which was the first NFT sold by a major auction house—marked a sea change in the viability of selling digital art at auction, and heralded a new era in the confluence of financial technology and art. As far as Beeple, the artist’s auction results returned to the realm of five to six figures following the earth-shattering “Everydays” sale, only to rocket back up into the millions again with the $28.99 million sale of HUMAN ONE (2021) at a Christie’s sale in November.
Jadé Fadojutimi, Myths of Pleasure, 2017. Courtesy of Phillips.Advertisement
Jadé Fadojutimi’s vibrant and sinewy abstractions have been winning the 28-year-old British painter fans for years now, but 2021 marked a new chapter in her market. Fadojutimi’s ascent can be traced back to 2019, when she became the youngest artist in the Tate collection, and the momentum from that acquisition soon carried over into solo shows at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery and Taka Ishii Gallery. December 2020 marked the first major stirrings in Fadojutimi’s secondary market, when her painting Lotus Land (2017) sold for $378,000, which represented a roughly sevenfold improvement over her existing auction record. But these numbers truly took off in 2021, which saw the artist break the $1 million price barrier at auction three times over the course of two days in October, resulting in a new record of £1.17 million ($1.6 million) for her 2017 painting Myths of Pleasure. This market momentum seems poised to continue into next year, building off the institutional momentum of Fadojutimi’s first solo museum show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, which opened in late November.
Aboudia, Jeux D’Enfant, 2012. Courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd.Aboudia, born Aboudia Abdoulaye Diarrassouba, was subject to some long-overdue market appreciation this year, achieving multiple successive auction records and consistently fetching prices in excess of $100,000 on the secondary market. The Ivorian artist’s frenetic gesture and raw expressiveness have caught the eyes of discerning collectors in the decade since his debut solo show in 2011, including the likes of Jean Pigozzi and Charles Saatchi; the latter exhibited a number of Aboudia’s works in his 2014 “Pangaea” exhibition series. But the artist’s secondary-market appearances moved at a bit more sluggish of a pace, with hammer prices slowly crawling into the tens of thousands—until this year.
In 2021, Aboudia’s work cracked $100,000 for the first time, with multiple pieces at a dedicated Christie’s online sale titled “Noutchy in New York City” fetching six-figure prices. Aboudia’s stellar market year would top out in October, with the sale of his 2012 work Jeux d’Enfant setting a new record for the artist by selling for £201,600 ($277,342). Perhaps the most impressive quality of Aboudia’s year is its sheer consistency: 40 of the artist’s works fetched six-figure prices this year, signaling not just one-off speculation but sustained interest in his practice.
Flora Yukhnovich, I’ll Have What She’s Having, 2020. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.Flora Yukhnovich exploded onto the secondary market this year after making her auction debut in April, just a few months after signing with tastemaking gallery Victoria Miro. The British artist’s impressive and imposing riffs on
compositions first appeared on the secondary market at a Bonhams London sale in April, where two untitled 2018 paintings sold for £16,500 ($22,951) and £21,500 ($29,906), results that were more than five and seven times their high estimates, respectively. That initial excitement set the tone for Yukhnovich’s stellar 2021. By June, just months after her auction debut, Yukhnovich surpassed the $1 million mark when her large-scale painting Pretty Little Thing (2019) sold for $1.18 million at a Phillips New York sale. That record would itself be smashed in October, when the textural bacchanalia of I’ll Have What She’s Having (2020) helped push its hammer price to £2.25 million ($3 million) at Sotheby’s London. Yukhnovich’s ascent looks primed to continue into next year, when the artist is scheduled to have her third solo exhibition with Victoria Miro.
Shara Hughes,
Shara Hughes is far from an art world newcomer, but 2021 marked a new level of success for the painter. Hughes has exhibited internationally for 14 years and is now represented by Pilar Corrias, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and David Kordansky Gallery. She had her breakout moment at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where the artist had an entire room dedicated to showcasing her vivid, kaleidoscopic landscape paintings. The acclaim from that show carried over into a series of exhibitions at notable galleries including Kasmin, Almine Rech, Rachel Uffner, and Pace Prints, and also spurred her secondary market, with 2018 marking the first year Hughes broke six figures at auction. Hughes’s market grew at a steady pace in the years following, but would take a dramatic leap past the $1 million mark this fall with the sale of her painting Night Picket (2017) at a Phillips London sale in October. The upward trend continued through the end of the year, topping out with her current auction record of $1.48 million, achieved in November.
Ewa Juszkiewicz, Girl in Blue, 2013. Courtesy of Phillips.Ewa Juszkiewicz’s surrealistic twists on classical European portraiture traditions have been subject to a meteoric market rise during her debut year at auction. The Polish artist’s work first hit the auction block this past March, with her 2009 painting The pods fetching the equivalent of a respectable $36,582. She rocketed into the six-figure range by the end of the month, when one of her paintings sold for £107,100 ($149,117) at a Sotheby’s London sale. Her secondary-market results grew by leaps and bounds from there, going from $480,000 to $600,000 over the course of two days in October. Juszkiewicz’s auction prices topped out at a Phillips New York sale in November, when the 2013 painting Girl in Blue fetched $730,800. When combined with her resume of sold-out solo shows at Almine Rech and representation with Gagosian, Juszkiewicz’s auction results bode well for the future.
Cinga Samson, Lift Off, 2017. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Cinga Samson’s breakout market year saw the painter’s auction records soar into the six-figure stratosphere after just two middling appearances on the secondary market last year. A Phillips New York sale in June blew the lid off Samson’s existing auction record of $16,000 when his 2018 portrait Two piece 1 sold for $378,000, good for a more than tenfold increase of the work’s high estimate. The writing was on the wall, in many ways: The South African artist had largely shown with Cape Town–based galleries like blank projects since starting his career in 2011, but in the past year has gained broader reach with solo shows at Perrotin and the FLAG Art Foundation. And in May, he signed with White Cube, indicating a broader global interest in his signature haunting portraits of blank-eyed Black sitters. Samson’s stellar year was capped off with the October sale of his 2017 portrait Lift Off, which sold for £321,300 ($439,170), which remains his auction record.
Justin Kamp
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Cassi Namoda’s Spiritual, Authentic Approach to Art
Cassi Namoda, Meat is meat, 2021. Photo by Paul Salveson. Courtesy of the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery.
Portrait of Cassi Namoda by Kunning. Courtesy of Cassi Namoda and François Ghebaly Gallery.
has worn her share of hats. Flitting between the worlds of art and fashion over the last decade, she’s found work as a studio assistant, a curator, an art director, an antiques dealer, a brand agent, and a window dresser, among other roles; and collaborated with friends on collections of cotton garments, jewelry, swimwear, and a limited-edition perfume.
But today, at 33, Namoda is recognized first and foremost as a painter. Her flat scenes of daily life in her native Mozambique, rendered in soft brushstrokes and vivid tones that pop against her characters’ Black-Brown skin, have seduced collectors and curators alike. Informed by memory, literature, and archival research, her paintings are rooted in reality, but often veer into the realm of dreams, as the artist draws from a personal and cross-cultural lexicon of symbols and characters to add layers of postcolonial allegory and narrative ambiguity.
For Namoda, who is self-taught, her recent fine art practice is an extension of the creative pursuits that precede it. “If you have a creative spirit—like an interested sort of disposition—and an authentic sense of self, anything that you delve into could actually be quite fascinating,” Namoda said over the phone from her SoHo studio. “It’s just what you happen to fall in love with.”
Since Namoda first presented herself as a painter in 2017, with a modest show of watercolors at Los Angeles’s Front Room Gallery, her profile has risen quickly and steeply. In 2020, she opened solo shows in London, Los Angeles, and Johannesburg, and attracted mainstream-ish attention when she was one of eight artists invited to illustrate a cover for Vogue Italia’s sustainability-themed January issue. (That September, she was one of 100 faces to appear on the magazine’s covers herself.)
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In 2021, Namoda made her South American debut with “The sun has not yet burned off the dew” at Mendes Wood DM’s São Paulo space, and participated in group shows in New York and Beirut. Her work has been collected by the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden in Marrakech, X Museum in Beijing, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In December, she opened her third solo show with François Ghebaly in Los Angeles, titled “Forgotten Limbs,” on view through January 15, 2022.
Every artist dreams of international reach, but that her career would take on such a global dynamic straight out the gate seems particularly fitting for Namoda, who reminisces warmly and often about her family’s “peripatetic lifestyle.” Born in Maputo to a Mozambican mother and an American father, who worked in the nonprofit sector, she moved often throughout her childhood to accommodate her father’s job, spending time in Indonesia, Kenya, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the United States, and Uganda.
Now based in East Hampton, New York, Namoda still retains a nomadic impulse, and has completed residencies in Oaxaca, Mallorca, and a Kenyan palm plantation. She can paint, it seems, anywhere. “At the end of the day, I think the grandest studio of all is life, and getting out there and experiencing the world,” she said. “So as much as I think it’s nice to have a couple of white walls, I’m totally fine with not having that either.”
In her early twenties, Namoda moved to New York, where she worked primarily in fashion, before settling in Los Angeles with her then-partner, the painter
, in 2016. It’s there that she began to take up painting in earnest: Feeling alienated and misunderstood in her new home, she began painting as a way to reconnect with herself. “[My practice] was the essence of free time and an emotional catharsis; there was really no ego…I was just thinking in terms of helping my spirit,” she said.
Though she had no formal training (she studied cinematography briefly at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco), painting felt natural. Growing up, Namoda said, she’d painted on and off, falling in love with pigments and paint. A suite of early paintings—naïve watercolors inspired by her “unrequited love” for the Island of Mozambique, a UNESCO-protected city renowned for its colonial Portuguese architecture—would lead to her first exhibition, and establish some of the themes and motifs that would become central to her practice: family, culture, mundanity, and color. The work itself, though, has evolved dramatically: Works on paper have been replaced by oil and acrylic on large-scale canvases; the palette is more vibrant; the brushwork more refined.
Africa has maintained a particular hold on Namoda’s spirit and imagination—not only its cities, but its villages, too. “There’s a cadence in rural Africa in which I’m able to see God, if I’m going to be absolutely spiritual about the whole thing—because for me, painting is spiritual,” she said, recalling the quiet, fragrant tea plantations of Gurúè, the village in northern Mozambique where her grandfather was born. “Even the nicest of resorts or the fanciest hotels in Tuscany can’t replace that feeling. I appreciate beauty in every sense possible, but I think there has to be an earthen quality in order for me to really be completely moved, and the earthen quality can’t be bourgeois for me.”
Stylistically, Namoda points to
,
,
, and
as some of her more transient sources of inspiration (“These artists come through me when they need me to see something,” she said). But ultimately, she aspires to reflect the “canon of thinking” represented by artists whose oeuvres speak to the experiences of Black people directly—like James Baldwin; African American painters
and
; and Ethiopian director Haile Gerima, whose critically acclaimed film Sankofa emphasizes the importance of ancestral roots and racial consciousness.
“So often as people of color, we have to, in some ways, dilute [our work], and I see that in the art market right now,” Namoda said. “Are we actually telling the most authentic story that we’re able to tell? It’s not just about hanging on Eurocentric walls. There’s a bigger picture; it’s [about] those who are coming after us.”
Going into 2022, Namoda remains as curious as ever. She wants to rest, yes, but she’s also eager to collaborate with fabricators on projects that reflect her interest in architecture, and to realize a work of performance art. She’s been thinking about branching into fiction, maybe; she has a residency in Senegal planned for 2023 that could provide the necessary quiet.
“If you’re just painting 24/7—at least for me—it can get quite mechanical,” she said. “You owe it to yourself to be able to explore, be able to ruminate, be able to rest.…Nothing is permanent, right? So we might as well really take time to find our true voices.
“The work is never done, the learning is never done, and I’m only scratching the surface.”
Allyssia Alleyne
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Maxwell Alexandre’s Debut at Palais de Tokyo Considers Power Dynamics in Art Spaces
Maxwell Alexandre, installation view of “New Power” at Palais de Tokyo, 2021. Photo by Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
’s exhibition “New Power,” currently on view at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris through March 20th, was inspired in part by the 2018 music video for “Apeshit” by Beyoncé and Jay-Z. The hip-hop couple’s triumphant traipsing through Europe’s most famous museum, the Louvre, reignited conversations about the sociology of museum visitors; the value and accessibility of culture; and above all, the tension between the museum’s pretentions of being a democratizing, educational space despite the troubled histories of colonialism and plunder that had built up its collections. The global resurgence of racism and xenophobia, exemplifed by the presidencies of Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, seemed to lend these concerns additional urgency.
It is in the crucible of this new global culture war that “New Power” was born. Consisting of large, loose sheets of paper, taped together and strung up throughout the high-ceilinged gallery in the north wing of the Palais de Tokyo’s lower level, the works transform a large open space into a sort of labyrinth. Overlapping and intersecting, the monumental surfaces form thin walls, at once delicate and impenetrable. The installation creates a compelling artistic metaphor for the barriers of structural discriminations (be they gendered, based on religion, or skin color). What the visitor seeks is often just out of reach or, at the very least, difficult to attain.
Maxwell Alexandre, installation view of “New Power” at Palais de Tokyo, 2021. Photo by Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.In addition to the disorientating spatial partitions, the suspended paintings commingle real visitors with painterly representations of various types of museumgoers, from school groups and couples to individuals and security guards. These personalities look at and interact with painted pastiches or silhouettes of famous works of art, many of which are recognizable contemporary art icons like
’s cruel A Thousand Years (1990),
’s Descent Into Limbo (1992), or one of
’s slashed Concetto spaziale works. Most, however, appear as anonymous rectangles of beige paper set into painted representations of ornate baroque frames. The particular type of paper used is called papel pardo and conveys an important double entendre: In Portuguese, pardo means “brown” and is a term still used today by the Brazilian census to designate Brazilians of “mixed race,” a vestige of the country’s complex colonial caste system.
Alexandre’s work is informed by his upbringing in Rocinha, the largest favela in Brazil, located in a southern Rio de Janeiro suburb. In these most recent works, he uses the multiple meanings of papel pardo to address contemporary debates about identity and representation, lending his work a specifically activist, political orientation. Indeed, although the works in “New Power” may make heavy-handed allusions to art history, they really are about who is looking at art. The painted representations of visitors are all faceless, Black, and blonde-haired. As such, they seem to represent a fully mixed world, although hierarchies and power dynamics still appear to remain. Indeed, the security guards in Alexandre’s musée imaginaire are dressed like Brazil’s militarized state police force, collapsing the small margin of authority held by museum guards over visitors into the more repressive and expansive authority of the state.
Maxwell Alexandre, installation view of “New Power” at Palais de Tokyo, 2021. Photo by Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.Advertisement
Alexandre shared his intentions for the installation in a statement: “Pretos no topo (Blacks on top) has become a slogan of local rap,” he wrote. “I wanted to show its implication in contemporary art and highlight that that’s where the winners are because that’s where the intellectual capital is concentrated. It’s not just about money, but about controlling the narrative and the image. Occupying and controlling these spaces is the consequence of a powerful alliance. We (black people) must be attentive to these places designed so that we cannot see them. We must be physically present, attend openings, go to galleries and museums, learn about art, consume culture in all of its forms.”
The representation of people of color in art spaces has come a long way in the decades since
published “Preliminary Notes for a Black Manifesto” in the pages of Studio International in 1978. That said, Alexandre’s political conclusions, however well-intentioned, are less impressive than his aesthetic ones.
Maxwell Alexandre, installation view of “New Power” at Palais de Tokyo, 2021. Photo by Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.For a certain category of contemporary art of the variety that Alexandre alludes to in “New Power,” it’s not the mystique of a dense theoretical underpinning, but rather the impressive spectacle of obscene wealth that bestows these works with their aura. Art by the likes of Hirst and
have become highly legible to a mass audience and, as a result, lucratively marketable.
In an interview with Lux Magazine, Alexandre demonstrates his intimate understanding of these art market dynamics, even citing them as important formal influences on the “Pardo è Papel” series, of which “New Power” is only the most recent manifestation: “People want a souvenir, they do not want art. The collector should be educated in this sense. The acquisition of an art object is not only the expansion of his or her asset portfolio, but involves the responsibility to shelter that which has now become an asset of humankind. My large pieces of brown craft paper will get ripped and they will deteriorate in time.…Hopefully, the museologists and conservators will accept the challenge of preserving these works and gallerists will support less-formatted works, and collectors will start dealing with the need to collect things that are not permanent. There is nothing more contemporary than this.”
Maxwell Alexandre, installation view of “New Power” at Palais de Tokyo, 2021. Photo by Aurélien Mole. Courtesy of the artist and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.The artist’s desire to create work that challenges some of the market’s worst habits is remarkable, but it makes his insistence that Black people ought to occupy those same market-driven spaces all the more perplexing. Indeed, his statement for “New Power” suggests a confusion between intellectual capital and financial capital and an erroneous conception of social hierarchies as dichotomies between losers and winners, rather than between exploiters and exploited. Furthermore, the identity politics framework presents representation as an end rather than as a means and “Black people” as homogenous rather than a grouping with divergent and contradictory class interests. When Beyoncé and Jay-Z walk through the Louvre or pose in a Tiffany & Co. ad with
’s painting Equals Pi (1982), perhaps they are not claiming these spaces as the domain of all Black people, but rather as symbolic extensions of their own personal wealth and success.
In a video interview with PalaisPopulaire (the institutional home of the Deutsche Bank collection), Alexandre discusses his appearance on the cover of the Brazilian Forbes “30 Under 30” issue, and then asks and answers the following question: “How can an artist change the world? By changing himself, the change is inside, without the pretension of this external change. It must occur through the contact of seeking the origin, everything is kept in me. I am the measure of all things, always looking inwards.” It’s hard not to hear this statement as echoing a familiar refrain. It is one that assimilates the success of a narrow Black elite to the general advancement of Black people. Without specifying which Black people ought to occupy what art spaces and what they should do once they are there, what we are left with is not a “New Power,” but an old power with a new face.
Wilson Tarbox
