Sotheby’s will offer a Diego Velázquez full-length portrait of Isabel de Borbón, queen of Spain and the first wife of Philip IV, for a princely $35mn in New York on February 1 2024. Its price tag — which would mark an auction record by far for the 17th-century painter — reflects the rarity of his court paintings on the public market as most remain in royal or museum collections.
The Sotheby’s work “disappeared” from Spain’s royal collection during Napoleon’s 1808 invasion and reappeared in France, says George Wachter, Sotheby’s co-chair of Old Master paintings. His colleague, Christopher Apostle, says of this work in particular, “Velázquez took inspiration from Rubens and created the Baroque language of Spain.”
The painting has been dated to the late 1620s, while Sotheby’s specialists note that its composition has similarities with a portrait of the king painted in 1631-32, in London’s National Gallery.
Subsequent private owners include the banker and book collector Henry Huth, who bought the work in 1853 and in whose family it remained until 1950. The portrait is now being sold by a private family trust which has owned the work since 1978, Sotheby’s says. The auction house has guaranteed a price for the painting, more of a rarity in the Old Masters arena.
After a three-year break, the space-sharing gallery collaboration Condo London comes back in the new year for its sixth iteration (January 20-February 17). The event, which involves London galleries hosting overseas counterparts, “involves so much moving around, I wanted things to be as back to normal as possible after Covid,” says Vanessa Carlos, who runs Carlos/Ishikawa gallery and is Condo’s founder-organiser.
Since Carlos launched the project in 2016, it has inspired similar free-to-visit events in the UK capital, notably London Gallery Weekend, which began in 2021 and had 130-plus participants this year. Carlos describes Condo as a “completely different” initiative. “It’s about the cross-pollination of galleries, it’s not for profit and should be kept small so that visitors can spend more time discovering another [gallery’s] programme,” she says.
This year 49 galleries take part in 23 spaces, up from 36 in 17 back in 2020. Spread across London, the latest pairings including Beirut’s Marfa’ Projects in The Approach and Mexico City’s Pamela Weissenberg at mother’s tankstation limited. Carlos/Ishikawa’s gallery hosts Chapter NY and Vienna’s Galerie Kandlhofer.
Joining Condo next year is Emalin, which has doubled down in east London with a second gallery. Opening on January 13, co-founders Leopold Thun and Angelina Volk have secured the Clerk’s House, a 1735 building so quaint that its address is 118½ Shoreditch High Street, next to St Leonard’s church. “It will provide more of an intimate, experiential encounter than our other space, which is one large room [in a former factory]. In the Clerk’s House, people can meander from room to room,” Thun says.
Their opening exhibition, a group show of about a dozen artists including Alvaro Barrington and Sung Tieu, has work inspired by the history and nature of the building. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Volk says, guards used the house as a lookout for graveyard body-snatchers. “It’s on the precipice of a church ground and the secular world, its number has an in-betweenness about it and the works on show build on that,” she says.
The gallery, which opened in 2016, has succeeded in bringing innovative and often complicated artists on to the scene. Its location, gentrifying fast, remains core: “We want to be part of the cultural fabric of the place we are in,” Volk says.
The Frieze art fair returns to its Santa Monica airport venue in Los Angeles for the second time next year, but organisers have decided against the experimental Barker Hangar section that housed 40 of its 124 exhibitors last time. “Having two locations, when you’re not crossing a beautiful park [as for the London fairs], can be a bit of a challenge,” says Christine Messineo, Frieze director of Americas.
A bit more room has been made on the main site, so the fair will have close to 100 exhibitors under one roof this time around, while the grounds outside the tent will house more installations, performances and “just more places for people to gather”, including restaurants, Messineo says. First-time participants in the fair next year include the galleries Bank and MadeIn from Shanghai.
A collection of 114 items of football-based art will be on sale through Bonhams online (December 4-13). The collection, assembled by the dealer Chris Beetles for a former chair of a Premier League team who wants to remain anonymous, was on view at his gallery last year, for sale as a whole and reportedly valued at £1.5mn. Now it comes as separate lots with a £260,000-£380,000 total estimate, priced to encourage pre-Christmas bidding. Beetles says that “the response from hundreds of enthusiasts was enormous, so we decided that the pictures should be offered to fans in this passionate market.”
The majority date from the 1920s-80s, with Arsenal the most represented team in the collection. Estimates range from £100-£150 for cartoons drawn by Roy Ullyett for the Daily Express in 1974 to £100,000-£150,000 for Charles Cundall’s painting of a 1926 FA Cup match between amateur team The Corinthians and Manchester City.
In his catalogue introduction, Beetles — a long-suffering Spurs fan — writes: “It is a rare event to find an original work of art featuring football . . . And so to Bonhams for the final away game; the players’ contracts are up and by December 13 the window closes and they will all have new owners.”
The collection can be seen at Bonhams, London between December 10-13.
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