NOW IS THE TIME TO REALIZE VALUE FROM YOUR ART HOLDINGS
"Santa Cruz, California, USA - April 1, 2012:  Framed prints at the Santa Cruz Flea Market with a woman visible in the background"
2021 sales figures for fine art are beginning to come in, and they are exceptional. Sotheby’s announced a record 7.3 billion in total sales, Christie’s saw a five year high with 7.1 billion, and Phillips had its most successful year with 1.2 billion. Both public auctions and private sales are included in their figures, which cover several different collecting areas, but Contemporary Art continues to drive the most activity and garner the biggest headlines.

This trend is expected to continue in 2022, so if you are considering selling, Cochran Arts can help value potential works and identify whether private sale or public auction is your best option. We recently worked with a collector to sell a group of 20th c. British prints at auction in London. We walked the collector through the process, helping to negotiate the terms and facilitate the overseas transportation of the work. All pieces sold at or above their presale estimates.

Art Fairs are back in 2022!
Gallery sales were equally strong in 2021, fueled in part by a bottlenecked fall season of regularly-scheduled and postponed art fairs. 2022 looks to return to a more even pace, although some fairs have taken advantage of the disruption to permanently change their dates. Here are a few highlights of this year’s schedule:

  • January 20-23 - Fog Art Fair, San Francisco
  • February 9-13 - Zona Maco, Mexico City
  • February 17-20 - Frieze, Los Angeles
  • February 23-27 - ARCO, Madrid
  • March 24-26 - Art Basel, Hong Kong
  • April 6-10 - SP-Arte, Sao Paulo
  • April 7-10 - Expo Chicago
  • April 21-24 - Dallas Art Fair
  • May 18-22 - Frieze, New York
  • May 20-22 - AIPAD Photography Show, New York
  • June 16-19 - Art Basel, Switzerland
  • September 8-11 - The Armory Show, New York
  • October (dates tbd) - Frieze, London
  • October 20-23 - FIAC, Paris
  • November 10-13 - Paris Photo
  • November 16-20 - Art Cologne
  • December 1-4 - Art Basel, Miami Beach
2021 included several groundbreaking retrospectives. If you missed the shows, you can still snuggle up this winter with these wonderful exhibition catalogs:
  • Alice Neel: People Come First (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
  • Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful (Columbus Museum and Chrysler Museum of Art)
  • Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror (Whitney Museum of American Art)
  • Joan Mitchell (SFMOMA and the Baltimore Museum of Art)