Frieze London Opens With a Sold-Out Oehlen Stand and a $6.5 Million Brueghel

Gagosian sold all six of its new Albert Oehlen paintings at the VIP opening of Frieze London on Wednesday (Oct. 14), the Oehlens we flagged in our Frieze Week guide. Across the park at Frieze Masters, Hauser & Wirth sold a flower still life by Jan Brueghel the Elder for about £5 million ($6.5 million), the highest price reported on day one, per The Art Newspaper. The Oehlens’ prices were not disclosed, but the paper understands they top $1 million each.

The Brueghel is a 17th-century bouquet of tulips, irises and other flowers in a stoneware vase, painted around 1607–08. It once belonged to Baron Alphonse von Rothschild and last sold at Sotheby’s London in 2016 for £3.8 million, Artnet reports.

It’s the very high and the very low stuff that is selling the best, it’s still a strange time.

Judith Greve, adviser, The Art Newspaper

Blue-chip stands stayed conservative while the daring work sat with smaller dealers. Pace says nearly all five of Marina Perez Simão’s large canvases sold for about $250,000 each, White Cube sold five Ilana Savdie paintings for $110,000 to $175,000, and Lisson placed two Dalton Paula paintings at £50,000 each. At the other end, the north London gallery Harlesden High Street, with text-based prints and sign-like works by Marcus Jefferson at £2,000 to £8,000, sold its entire stand by the end of VIP day.

Access was the other story. “It’s hard to buy right now,” one London collector told Artnet, meaning it was hard to get the most desirable work. The adviser Nico Epstein said excitement is concentrated in “heat pockets.” One was Pilar Corrias’s booth, back after a two-year break to focus on Art Basel Paris, where everything sold.

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Paris loomed over the whole fair. Pace’s Marc Glimcher called London “a fair suited for solo presentations” while “Paris is a more buoyant selling opportunity,” and the adviser Philip Hoffman said “the serious money is going to Paris.” Art Basel Paris opens to the public Oct. 23. Frieze has already moved to meet the calendar, adding a Saturday VIP hour for the first time.

The satellites had their own verdicts. Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred called Paraiso, a new London fair for Latin American art, “the surprise triumph of the season,” and found the “artist-first” Fair Play inconsistent (Artnet bulletin). Artnet also listed the shows competing for collectors’ time, including Tarek Atoui’s sound installation in the Turbine Hall, Anish Kapoor at the Hayward and Salman Toor at the Courtauld.

Several galleries from the Middle East and North Africa came courting Western institutions ahead of Frieze’s Abu Dhabi debut next month. Casablanca’s Loft Art Gallery, new to Frieze in its Spotlight section, brought wave-patterned paintings by the Moroccan modernist Mohamed Melehi, and two were on hold by lunchtime. Before the London opening, the fair says, VIP bookings from the region were up 24 percent on last year.

Frieze closed Sunday (Oct. 18), and the art world now moves on to Paris.