Not everyone will know his name, let alone his paintings, yet Aboudia has emerged as the bestselling artist of 2022, based on the number of artworks sold at auction, to the surprise of market experts.

Aboudia, aka Abdoulaye Diarrassouba, 40, whose art is inspired by street culture in his home town of Abidjan in Ivory Coast, heads the Hiscox Artist Top 100, a new survey analysing key trends in contemporary art that will be published on Monday.

Aboudia’s work is influenced by the graffiti of Abidjan and the traditional wood carvings of West Africa, and has been compared to the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who made his name with graffiti-like images.

Since the Ivorian civil war in 2011, Aboudia’s pictures have reflected the trauma of man’s inhumanity to man with images of skulls and soldiers.

The Hiscox survey found that a total of 75 artworks by Aboudia were auctioned, followed by Damien Hirst with 73 works.

His prices have soared from a few thousand pounds about a decade ago to six figures today. Christie’s in London sold one of his untitled paintings for £504,000 last year.

Robert Read, head of art and private clients at Hiscox, said he had not previously heard of Aboudia and was taken aback by his auction success.

“But then I’m constantly surprised by things that happen, especially in the contemporary art market … That’s what makes it so exciting … Aboudia seems to be an artist that people want to speculate in,” he said.

The Jack Bell gallery in London gave Aboudia his first UK show in 2011, and the artist counts Charles Saatchi among his collectors.

Oliver Durey, Jack Bell’s director, said: “It has been great to see the level of international engagement in Aboudia’s practice increase over the years.”

The market success may reflect a rising interest in modern art from Africa, with leading western museums and galleries building up collections.

Among the survey’s other findings, David Hockney was the bestselling artist in global auction value in 2022. His sales generated $75m (£61m). His most valuable painting was Winter Timber of 2009, which fetched $23m (£19.3m) at Christie’s in New York in November.

The research was carried out for Hiscox, an international specialist insurer, by ArtTactic, a research and analysis firm.

Its findings are based on unique artworks – editions were not included – made after 2000, which have been auctioned at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips between 2018 and 2022. The research includes more than 23,000 lots from more than 3,800 artists.

The data reveals that the past two years saw a significant increase in the value of contemporary work sold, peaking in 2021 at almost $1.2bn.

It also reflected a market that has become increasingly speculative with, for example, “a dramatic increase in art being flipped as ‘wet paint’ sales”, those re-sold at auction within two years of being made, which more than doubled last year.

Read said: “We suspected that over time, the contemporary market had become more speculative, but last year wet paint sales sky-rocketed. Art is an attractive asset class for investors in the long run, but reselling within such short periods can have a destabilising effect on the market as it creates a speculative bubble.”

Chosen from more than 8,000 submissions, the winners of this year’s Nature TTL Photographer of the Year competition capture both the immense beauty of our planet and the threats we face with a changing climate. Thomas Vijayan took home the top prize for his heartbreaking panoramic of the Austofonna Ice Cap cracking and emitting gushing waterfalls into the sea. Covering more than 8,000 square kilometers, Austoffana is rapidly melting in a region experiencing the disastrous effects of warming temperatures and rising sea levels. Also recognized were a spectacular image of the Northern Lights streaming through an Icelandic cave, a jaguar wandering through a cinder block wall, and a ball of honeybees clamoring for a new home.

Find some of our favorite photos below, and view the complete gallery at Nature TTL.

Lucy Monckton, “House Hunting,” Staffordshire, United Kingdom

Thomas Vijayan, “Austfonna Ice Cap,” Svalbard, Norway

Fernando Constantino Martínez Belmar, “Crossing Barriers,” Solidaridad, Quintana Roo, Mexico

Andy Schmid, “Crowd Control,” Skjervøy, Norway

Jane Hope, “Fighting Robins,” Scotland, United Kingdom

Josselin Cornou, “Strong Solar Storm Through an Icelandic Cave,” Iceland

Rowan Dear, “Depth Perception,” Manly Beach, Sydney, Australia

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From his studio in Chino, California, Philip Kupferschmidt (previously) fashions cavernous ceramic vessels that drip and ooze with vibrant glazes. After throwing a piece on the wheel, the artist warps, stretches, and crushes the walls of a vase or pot that he later covers with thick droplets or chunky globs. Many of the sculptures appear to slouch under the weight of the liquid, their sides folded and creased into skewed shapes.

Kupferschmidt has been creating drip-covered works for several years and recently began a series of Supergloops, vessels with more pigments and material variances than his typical one- or two-toned works. “I’m exploring interactions of color and texture that overall, hope to give impressions of otherworldly environments if one were shrunk down and navigating the confined spaces of the vessels, kind of like in the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” he says. “Additionally, I’m channeling my love/awe of nature, frustration with man-made natural disasters, and memories of my 90’s childhood into this work.”

If you’re in Los Angeles, you can see Kupferschmidt’s works as part of a group show opening September 28 at Tappan Collective. The artist plans to release pieces in his shop later this fall, so follow him on Instagram for news about that drop.

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A flying visit to Accra by the shooting star of African art, Amoako Boafo, underlines the Ghanaian capital’s growing importance as one of the world’s great art destinations. Boafo returned briefly to his hometown for Accra Cultural Week (13-18 September), a series of cultural events including exhibitions, talks and studio visits that drew an eclectic mix of artists, collectors, gallerists and journalists from Europe and the US, as well as Africa.

Although Boafo has had a stratospheric career trajectory to date, exhibiting with Gagosian and selling works to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the week’s events revealed a strong sense of fraternity among artists of the African diaspora, who make a point of sharing their experience and good fortune with the next generation of talent.

Boafo, who is 39 and has been based in Vienna for several years, has an auction record of more than $3m for his figurative pictures of Black subjects, often painted with his fingertips. In Accra, he is showing a self-portrait in the exhibition In and Out of Time (until 12 December), the highlight of the week’s itinerary, which explores African cultural ideas about non-linear time.

Boafo told The Art Newspaper that he was also in town to check on the residency he offers other artists at his purpose-built art space, dot.ateliers. “My success, hopefully, has allowed me to impact the lives of others in my community,” he said. “Being able to provide resources for members in my creative community through my residency means a lot to me.”

Residencies are a thriving part of the Ghanaian art scene, according to Gyankroma Akufo-Addo, who is the chief executive of the Creative Arts Agency, a “conduit” between the government and the creative sector. She is also the daughter of Ghana’s president since 2017, Nana Akufo-Addo. “The fine art world is a gatekeeping world,” she said. “What Amoako does is he opens his doors to a residency of new artists. It’s a hamster wheel of all these amazing and prolific new artists who are going through and being encouraged.”

In and Out of Time has been curated by Ekow Eshun, a former director of the ICA in London, whose family is from Ghana. The exhibition also features work by Boafo’s contemporaries Serge Attukwei Clottey and Gideon Appah. Like him, they have a substantial international profile.

“These artists haven’t just come out of nowhere,” Eshun said. “Although they’re young, they’ve been working on their craft for some years now. There have been Ghanaian artists who have come before, but there’s never been a generation of artists who have been able to work with this proficiency, this ease, until now.” Social media sites like Instagram have “flattened the landscape” and made African art more accessible to an international audience, he added, and the Black Lives Matter movement has spurred collectors and galleries to catch up with the continent.

The Ghanaian-born artist Arthur Timothy travelled from his home in Bath to see his works exhibited in Eshun’s exhibition. Interested in Black people who lived in Italy at the time of the Renaissance but barely figured in art history, he has painted African women strolling through Florence in vivid traditional fabrics.

Accra Cultural Week, which has been running since 2016, is backed by a millionaire Lebanese-born developer, Marwan Zakhem. Eshun’s show takes place at Gallery 1957, founded by Zakhem in 2016 on the premises of his newly built Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City, and named after the year Ghana gained independence from Britain. The construction magnate has been supporting and collecting works by local artists for many years.

Until recently, Ghana was considered an African success story, but that was before several economic shocks left Akufo-Addo’s government struggling to pay the country’s debts. The national currency is the Cedi, and one artist exhibiting in cultural week made the lowliest coin in his countrymen’s pockets the subject of tapestries and sculptural pieces.

”I’m very interested in the idea of value and currency. I’m interested in the making of coinage from mere metal into objects of value,” explained Yaw Owusu, who is 30. These ideas have a clear resonance with the art market itself, he agreed.

Private collectors have been willing to travel to Ghana in recent years, and Zakhem began taking them to artists’ studios to help them understand the practice of someone like Clottey, who makes works from fragments of large plastic water canisters, a ubiquitous feature of poorer communities.

“We brought people to Serge’s studio and they really got it,” Zakhem said. “With these visits, they understood the artists, and that helped us sell the work.” His cultural week initiative has played no small part in building an art-world buzz around Accra. Zakhem ventures, “It’s like the Young British Artists in the 80s—that’s what we have here, we have a movement that’s happening.”

Meandering rows of flat paper seeds flow through Ilhwa Kim’s landscapes, creating densely lined paths among the abstract expanses. The South Korean artist (previously) rolls tight wads of Hanji paper, which she’s dyed primarily in greens and blues with occasional pinks and yellows, and binds the individual components in a rectangular form. Variances between the slim, tall seeds and the short, wider pieces add texture and depth to the aerial-inspired works that appear to look down at a settlement or pastoral scene from above.

The sculptures shown here are part of Kim’s forthcoming solo show at London’s HOFA Gallery titled Tacticle Hands. Referring to the pieces as “living architecture,” the artist gravitates toward movement, conveying heaving breaths or the way a breeze can make a field of grass seem as if it’s dancing. “I create artworks that combine sculpture and painting in order to explore the richness, dynamism, and depth of sensory experience on canvas,” she says. “These layered, entangled, and ever-evolving sensory experiences, happening in a world defined by nature’s infinite possibilities, are what I strive to capture in my works.”

Tactile Hands is on view from September 29 to October 11. You can find more of Kim’s sculptures on Instagram.

“Developer” (2023), hand-dyed Hanji paper, 119 x 93 x 13 centimeters

“Archaeological White” (2023), hand-dyed Hanji paper, 132 x 164 x 13 centimeters

“Private Walk” (2023), hand-dyed Hanji paper, 119 x 93 x 13 inches

“Rocket’s High” (2023), hand-dyed Hanji paper, 119 x 93 x 13

“Low Altitude Flight” (2023), hand-dyed Hanji paper, 192 x 224 x 13 centimeters

“Tender Strokes” (2023), hand-dyed Hanji paper, 132 x 164 x 13 centimeters

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Salma Price-Nell gravitates toward patterns, harnessing their aesthetic and metaphorical properties through ink drawings. Currently based in the U.K., the Cape Malay illustrator painstakingly renders wispy willow tendrils, gnarled trunks, and wide, sloping canopies with delicate crosshatching and linework.

She tells Colossal that her interest in natural motifs—and those found in trees, in particular—was born from mediation and a realization that everything is connected. “All matter is made from the same elements, and although every individual thing is a different composition of those substances, we are all results of a sequence of patterns that have formed and been refined over time, billions of years of time,” she shares. “These patterns have established our laws of physics and many invisible laws that we are bound to.”

Price-Nell’s practice reflects these ideas as she draws small, recurring forms like individual leaves or the crinkles in tree bark to form larger scenes. She finds peace and calm in this slow, repetitive process, and the resulting works reflect what the illustrator most admires about her subject matter. “Trees seem to have developed some of the most harmonious and admirable traits during the course of their evolution,” she says. “Of course, I am not a tree and can never be one, but I can aspire to be more resilient, generous, nurturing, independent, patient, present, grounded, secure, humble, balanced, nonjudgemental, peaceful, graceful.”

Shop prints and originals on Price-Nell’s site, and head to Instagram for a glimpse into her meditative process.

“Willow”

Detail of “Willow”

“Velvet Shank Mushrooms”

“Tree of Presence”

“The Charmed Tree”

“Sanctuary”

“Mystic Japanese Camphor Tree”

“Lucky Mushroom”

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In her still lifes and avian portraits, Chicago-based artist Leah Gardner showcases the way evening light can transform a humble tomato cluster or pot of tea into an object of intrigue and beauty. Working in oil paint on panel, Gardner’s visible, impasto brushstrokes depict sweeping shadows on tabletops and backdrops skewed through glass. “What excites me most is finding the colors hiding everywhere in plain sight, then deciding how much power to give them to create the mood I am after. It feels like a puzzle,” she says.

Entirely self-taught, Garnder first began painting a few years ago after the initial COVID-19 lockdowns. She gravitated toward still life because of the consistency a static image offers. “As I improved, it became an opportunity to create a narrative of a moment in time and tell a snippet of a story, while also getting to control for factors like light, position of shadows, and experiment with visually pleasing composition from the ground up,” she says. “I enjoy owning the process every step of the way.” Today, her works continue to evolve as she accentuates light and movement and identifies the extraordinary moments within everyday life.

Prints and originals are available in the artist’s shop, and you can follow her latest work on Instagram.

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Midwestern flora and fauna are the foundation for Carol Long’s lavishly adorned sculptures, which elegantly meld Art Nouveau embellishments with natural motifs. The Kansas-based artist (previously) continues her process of pushing and pulling the sides of a thrown vessel to achieve exaggerated proportions. Bublous bases, thin, curvy handles, and wobbly openings are characteristic of her ceramic sculptures, which she garnishes with slip-trail textures evoking fungi gills or bushy bunny tails.

Long has pieces in several shows, including at the Salina Art Center through October 15, 2023, and Fuller Craft Museum through January 28, 2024. She’s currently experimenting with adding molds and casts to her process and preparing to send a few sculptures to the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts conference this spring with In Tandem Gallery. Explore an archive of her works on Instagram.

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Dickinson will bring a late Lucian Freud portrait of billionaire property developer Pat Doherty to Frieze Masters, where it will be offered for about £15mn. “Profile Donegal Man” (2008) was on loan to the Irish Museum of Modern Art from 2016 to 2021, and was then shown at the recent Lucian Freud: New Perspectives exhibition, which started in London’s National Gallery before travelling to Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Doherty sat for about 300 hours over 85 sessions for the unflinching portrait, according to Milo Dickinson, managing director of the gallery. The work will be the highlight of Dickinson’s booth dedicated to “artists in Soho”, which will also include work by Thomas Lawrence, Edward Burne-Jones and Frank Auerbach. Doherty, who is selling the work through Dickinson, is known to have another portrait by Freud in his collection.

This week, Frieze announced some highlights of its London and Masters fairs, which take place in Regent’s Park between October 11 and 15. Some of these coincide with exhibitions in the city: Julianknxx, who is on view at the Barbican Centre, will be at Edel Assanti’s booth at Frieze London; El Anatsui, who opens in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall on October 10, will have a solo booth at Jack Shainman Gallery in Frieze Masters. Stretching back much earlier is a collection of 73 stone-age axes, brought by ArtAncient and priced from £500 to £250,000.

In New York, Luxembourg + Co gallery has opened an exhibition dedicated to works that don’t exist. Man Ray’s “Objects” were conceived by the artist between the 1910s and 1930s, but possibly never made. Instead he later made replicas of the “originals”, which he adjusted each time he made them. “Everyone understands Duchamp’s big revolution with his ready-mades. But Man Ray also made a radical gesture, to question our obsession with the original,” says Alma Luxembourg, partner at the gallery. “In the digital age, when we are constantly taking photos, such questions are even more relevant.”

Man Ray’s variations evolved over 50 years, Luxembourg notes. For example, the so-called “Cadeau” — a ready-made iron with a row of sharp nails, conceived in 1921 — developed alongside haberdashery technology. A photographed eye fixed to the needle of a metronome, now known as “Objet indestructible” (though this title also evolved), changed with the artist’s romantic affiliations.

The exhibition aims to chart such evolutions based on five objects and through about 25 works. A small number of pieces are for sale, priced between €80,000-€800,000 (until December 2).

Art Basel has beefed up its management with the hires of Hayley Romer as chief growth officer — a new role and a job title you don’t hear every day — and of Craig Hepburn as chief digital officer. Romer, who joins this month, was previously publisher and chief revenue officer of The Atlantic magazine, while Hepburn joins next month from European football body Uefa, where he was most recently head of digital.

Noah Horowitz, who became chief executive of Art Basel last year, explains that Romer’s role will be to focus on the growth of its brand outside of the fairs — such as through partnerships and marketing — while Vincenzo de Bellis, director of fairs and exhibition platforms and also appointed in 2022, will focus on the events themselves. Horowitz says Romer and Hepburn’s experience from outside of the art world is part of an exercise to “elevate all our competences with really talented individuals”.

Meanwhile, Marc Spiegler, previously global director of Art Basel, has joined the board of Superblue, a platform for immersive, experiential art. Spiegler, who is also advising the audio business Kef on its arts strategy and is a visiting professor at Milan’s Bocconi University, says he is “building a portfolio of projects”.

Anyone interested in the nuances of the art industry may wish to seek out Commercial Galleries: Bricks, Clicks and the Digital Future, the latest book in the Lund Humphries and Sotheby’s Institute of Art’s Hot Topics in the Art World series. (Disclosure: I have written a book in this series.) Written by Henry Little, an art adviser at the Fine Art Group and co-founder of the Breese Little gallery (now closed), the book gives insights into a sector that manages to be both rapidly changing and stubbornly still.

Digital advances during the pandemic have given artists and the industry around them a newfound popularity (plus plenty of data on current and potential buyers). Despite such progress, Little concludes that “expensive, complicated or intellectually rarefied art will always resist easy digital consumption . . . Without being wilfully conservative, we can safely assume that the commercial gallery model as it exists today, with all its digital intransigence, will endure.”

There are some memorable turns of phrase, not least likening the biggest few galleries to “swollen truffle pigs” when scouring for new artists, while I concur with Little that “we may even see a gallery on the Moon if the ultra-rich visit frequently enough.”

And finally, dinosaurs are back — at least on the art market. The craze paused for a while last year when a T-Rex, nicknamed Shen and estimated at $15mn-$25mn, was withdrawn from auction at Christie’s in Hong Kong, reportedly because concerns were raised that not enough of its bones were original.

Now we have Barry, a five-metre-long Jurassic iguanodon dated from about 150mn years ago, unearthed in Wyoming in 2000. It is up for sale at Giquello & Associés at Drouot, Paris, with a €800,000-€1.2mn estimate, on October 20. The auction house specialists emphasise that their specimen consists of a high percentage of original bone (more than 80 per cent), including more than 90 per cent of its skull.

In 2020, Christie’s made a record for a dinosaur skeleton when it sold Stan, a 12-metre-long T-Rex, for $31.8mn (with fees) to the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi, due to be completed by the end of 2025.

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