Fierce, volleying bids were offered between phone bidders for Ethel Spowers’ 1933 painting, The Battle (Lot 24 ), eclipsing previous auction records to reach $230,000 hammer ($282,273 inc BP). Although she remained childless, nursery rhymes, childhood games, and fairytales provided a constant source of inspiration for the pioneering modernist artist from her earliest woodcuts and linocuts. Dynamically contrasting the curves of a rocking horse against line formations of toy cavalry, The Battle harnesses the power of the golden age of illustration and radical new techniques of the machine age Spowers had learnt overseas. It was held in the artists’ family and has not been seen in a public exhibition since 1948. Rare as hens’ teeth, oil paintings by Ethel Spowers have only appeared at auction twice before, both offered at Bonhams in 2013 from the Estate of the Artist and purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for $103,700 and $91,500 (prices inc. BP) respectively. Clearly, the NGA has shown the way with Ethel Spowers, also having presented, under the Know My Name initiative elevating the work of Australian women artists, a touring exhibition of Ethel Spowers and her peer Eveline Syme, which ran from August 2022 - June 2023.
Comprising the bulk of both the “International Art” section of the auction’s title, and of pre-sale estimate totals, two contemporary, editioned sculptures by Spanish and American artists set local auction records and achieved the second and third highest prices of the night. Manolo Valdés’s iconic sculpture, Reina Mariana, echoing Diego Velázquez's 1653 portrait of the second wife of Felipe IV, sold to an internet bidder who was victorious against a phone bidder, for $400,000 hammer. Minutes later, a polychrome aluminium sculpture of Hope (Blue/Red), by American artist Robert Indiana, produced in 2009 to align the Democrat political campaign, sold for $600,000 to a commission bid left with the auctioneer.
Other records broken on the night were also for sculpture. British artist MacKenzie Thorpe’s Sunshine on my Shoulder (Lot 17 ) eclipsed the previous high of $45,000 inc BP (standing since 2012) through competing online bidders even before the auction started, finally settling for $46,000 to a phone bidder. Likewise, Deborah Halpern’s imposing mosaic Queen (Lot 20 ) sold for $62,000 - one of the largest works offered at auction, it comfortably set a new record. Strong results were also seen for traditional paintings and works on paper that were fresh to auction, including John Skinner Prout’s c.1842 watercolour, A View Of Sydney (lot 08) and James Alfred Turner’s The Local Talent, 1903 (Lot 85 ) surpassing expectations to sell for $25,000 and $15,000 respectively.
While all three Garry Shead paintings offered passed in, despite being “priced to sell by motivated vendors”, works by female artists fared better. To Feel Deeply, a 2019 portrait by Del Kathryn Barton (Lot 19 ) was fought over between phone bidders to settle at $125,000, providing a tidy and rapid increase in price from its last sale, a little over two years ago, for $116,591 inc. BP. Impressive examples of paintings by First Nations artists also sold well, including $60,000 for a Sally Gabori painting repatriated from Brazil (Lot 67 ), and $60,000 for a hypnotic and large Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri work (Lot 60 ), in line with other prices realised at auction both locally and in the United States.
The auction realised $5.4 million hammer ($6.6 million including buyer’s premium), with 111% of the lots sold by value and 85% sold by number.
