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London’s October Auction Results Suggest the Market Is Playing It Safe

Contemporary artists with major museum shows behind them, from Michael Armitage to Igshaan Adams, beat estimates, while some once-hyped names struggled. Ultimately, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips's solid totals were built on careful curation.

If Hong Kong’s September sales hinted at where art market money is going, London’s October auctions made it plain. Buyers are concentrating on established names, preferably ones with institutional backing. The other reliable draw is major single-owner collections, which sell as much on provenance and backstory as on the art itself. The week opened with Monsoon: The Peter Simon Collection Evening Sale, which brought in £107.5 million, the highest total for a single-owner collection ever achieved at Christie's London. Peter Simon, the founder of British retailer Monsoon, assembled a collection ranging widely in style and period, reflecting a personal cultural trajectory and, in particular, his interest in craft, textile production, travel, color and abstraction.

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Leading the sale was Francis Bacon’s highly anticipated Figure in Movement (1978), which fetched £17.2 million after several minutes of bidding, selling to a bidder in the room. Amid the ongoing rediscovery of overlooked women artists, a new record was set for Russian Constructivist Liubov Popova, whose work sold for £7.6 million against a low estimate of £1.8 million after eight minutes of bidding. Other top lots included a Joan Miró (£8.5 million) and Piet Mondrian’s iconic Composition A, with Double Line and Yellow (£9.71 million), while Hurvin Anderson’s Last House landed at £5.7 million against a £2-3 million estimate.

Most other lots landed within expectations, many safely secured by guarantees and the usual pre-sale agreements that shield today’s auction houses from most open-market casualties. Yet several contemporary names that have gained recognition in recent years beat their high estimates. The opening lot by Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera, estimated at £70,000-100,000, fetched £300,000, setting a new auction record for the artist and surpassing the previous benchmark of $355,600, achieved by Vese Vakandibata (They All Gave Me Strength) at Sotheby's New York in 2023. In just a few years, Zvavahera has seen a meteoric rise, landing representation with Zwirner as well as institutional shows that validated the work and its market, including Kettle’s Yard, the Fruitmarket, Fondation Louis Vuitton, ICA Boston and the Fridericianum. Her work is also in the collections of institutions including Tate, Pérez Art Museum Miami and Zeitz MOCAA.

An intriguing, seemingly abstract painting by Peter Doig also performed well, reaching £832,000 with fees against a £300,000-600,000 estimate. It was followed by Elephants (2015) by Michael Armitage, which backed by a third-party guarantee, fetched £1.1 million against a £700,000 high estimate. His auction record was set in May 2025, when another, larger 2015 painting, Mpeketoni, sold for $2.4 million. These results follow a major show at Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi in Venice and an extensive solo exhibition at Zwirner last year. Here again is a contemporary artist with strong institutional support, with works in the collections of MoMA, Tate and the Met, among others.

The sale also set a record for Bridget Riley, whose hypnotic Streak 2 reached £5.2 million against a £3-5.5 million estimate. The work featured in Tate’s 2003 retrospective of the artist, as well as in shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney (traveling to City Gallery Wellington), the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau, the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea and, most recently, the 2019 survey at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, which traveled to the Hayward Gallery in London. A new record was also set for a painting on board by Barbara Hepworth, which Simon acquired in 1996, at £537,600 against a £150,000-250,000 estimate.

The house’s combined 20/21 Evening Sales generated a total of £218.6 million, with the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale achieving £111 million, led by Wassily Kandinsky’s 1907 masterpiece Das bunte Leben, which reached £31.6 million after almost six minutes........

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