<img decoding="async" class="size-full-width wp-image-1601273" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/Yu-Ge-Wang-sells-the-top-lot-of-the-21st-Century-Evening-Sale-Featuring-Works-from-the-Edlis-_-Neeson-Collection-Christopher-Wools-Untitled-RIOT-for-19840000.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="An auctioneer stands at the Christieâs podium, raising her arm mid-bid in a packed auction room. Two large screens flank her: the left displays the current bid for the lot in multiple currencies, and the right shows Christopher Woolâs 1990 artwork Untitled (RIOT) with the bold blue letters âR I O Tâ stacked vertically. The Christieâs logo and the numbers â20/21â appear behind the podium, while silhouettes of seated attendees fill the foreground.” width=”970″ height=”647″ data-caption=’Yü-Ge Wang sells the top lot of the 21st Century Evening Sale: Christopher Wool’s <em>Untitled (RIOT)</em>. <span class=”media-credit”>Courtesy of Christie's</span>’>
We are already halfway through this week’s auction marathon, and the fatigue is beginning to press in—following the adrenaline rush of the first record-setting sessions, with Sotheby’s $706 million Evening Sale and Christie’s $689 million opener. Christie’s 21st Century sale on Wednesday, November 20 didn’t deliver the same fireworks or headline-grabbing records as the nights before, but it still produced a strong, confident performance, closing at $123,585,950 across 45 lots with a high sell-through rate of 98 percent and 97 percent by value. A calibrated mix of irrevocable bids and third-party guarantees helped shape a choreography of sustained bidding from every geography, with competition unfolding on the phones, in the room and online. After last night’s results, Christie’s Fall Marquee Week is running at $870,924,382—an extraordinary tally by comparison with recent seasons—and the morning sessions are still to come. “With spirited participation from start to finish, tonight’s sale was an undeniable signal of the strong market for quality works from the postwar and contemporary eras,” noted Kathryn Widing, Christie’s head of 21st Century Evening Sale, in her wrap-up statement.
The evening opened with the first group of works from the collection of Austrian-born American collector and philanthropist Stefan Edlis and his life partner, Gael Neeson, described by the auction house as a rare, tightly curated ensemble of postwar icons tracing the evolution of modern and contemporary art. Estimated at more than $40 million across the lots offered in the 21st Century Evening Sale and the Post-War and Contemporary Day Sale, the first 19 works brought in $49,223,800. The top result came from Andy Warhol’s The Last Supper, which sold for $6.6 million with Alex Rotter on the phone, ultimately reaching $8,127,000 with fees.
As the first lots of the sale, Edlis Neeson’s Andy Warhol acid green and pink skull and Cindy Sherman’s staged cinematic frame Untitled Film Still #13 set the tone, landing respectively at $1.5 million hammer ($1,905,000 with fees) and $1.8 million ($2,271,000 with fees), the latter outperforming its $700,000 high estimate by more than three times. After the $3,369,000 Richard Prince cowboy sculpture (a record for the artist in that medium) came another star lot of the collection: Ed Ruscha’s blue-mountain text-scape How Do You Do? which, however, hammered in a straightforward (likely pre-arranged) fashion at $5.5 million ($6,785,000 with fees), squarely within its $5-7 million estimate. This was somewhat restrained given the strong market momentum following MoMA’s major retrospective last year, which helped fuel Ruscha’s rise at auction. The artist’s most recent record was set by Christie’s in the same Evening Sale last November, when Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half (1964) fetched $68.26 million.
Warhol’s Oxidation immediately after was treated more harshly, landing at $1.7 million after a few minutes of bidding against an estimate of $900,000 to $1.2 million. There was far more excitement around his The Last Supper, which sold in the room for a million dollars after a brief but intense bidding match against Rotter on the phone.
The design creations of Diego Giacometti were met with engaged bidding, confirming the strength of the market for collectible and historical design. The first console, Promenade des amis, which had accompanied them all, eventually achieved $3,979,000. It was followed by two libraries, Au Mexique, sold consecutively for $2,088,000 and $2,027,000, with multiple phone bidders pursuing them from different continents. A few lots later, a rare low table by Giacometti, Berceau Low Table, Modèle aux Renards (circa 1974), surged to $3.65 million hammer ($4,528,000 with fees) from its more modest $1,500,000-2,500,000 estimate after a prolonged bidding battle among three phone bidders in different parts of the world.
After that, the probably too-provocative John Currin and the Jeff Koons gazing ball struggled to attract additional bidders, landing below their estimates and selling straightforwardly at their minimum guaranteed prices, respectively $1,250,000 and $596,900.
With the Neeson-Edlis segment closing on the momentum of Giacometti’s low table, the rest of the evening unfolded as a night of selectivity punctuated by flashes of intensity, mostly confirming how demand in the contemporary category today remains concentrated around artists with solid institutional profiles and exhibition histories.
From there, the baton passed to Yü-Ge Wang, who delivered her usual energetic multilingual performance, beginning with the lengthy international bidding war ignited by Firelei Báez’s Untitled (Colonization in America, Visual History Wall Map, Prepared by Civic Education Service). Multiple contenders vied between phone and online bids (including a bidder from Kazakhstan), pushing the hammer price to $875,000, which surpassed the million-dollar mark with fees ($1,111,250), more than five times its initial primary-market estimate of $150,000-200,000. The consignor had acquired the work already on a secondary passage from James Cohan Gallery, New York. The result set a new record price for the artist, eclipsing the $685,000 benchmark reached at Phillips just a few hours before.
After that, spirited bidding accompanied a work by another woman artist with broad institutional recognition and attention: Amy Sherald’s A Clear Unspoken Granted Magic fetched $4,101,000, setting the second-highest price for the artist among the only eight works that have come to auction so far.
A few lots later came the true top lot of the evening, in the now unexpectedly revitalized market for long-“zombie” artist Christopher Wool: the monumental Untitled (RIOT) drew multiple bidders, culminating in a back-to-back battle between Alex Rotter and a woman in the room, and eventually hammering to the latter for a striking $19,840,000—still just shy of its $20 million high estimate.
In between, however, Christie’s saw one of the more clamorous moments of the night, when a 2022 painting by Cecily Brown failed to find a bid and stalled below the $3 million low estimate, despite the new record set the day before. It was a sharp reminder of how selective the market remains when the work on offer isn’t the absolute top quality required to justify a $4-6 million estimate.
After the Wool, the sale regained its rhythm, beginning with Kerry James Marshall’s Portrait of John Punch (Angry Black Man 1646)—slated to travel from the Royal Academy in London to the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris—which drew immediate competition and sold for $7,151,000, above its $5-6 million estimate. A lot later, a work by Joan Brown, a key figure of the Bay Area Figurative Movement and one of the most distinctive American painters of the postwar era, saw even more energized bidding from multiple contenders, with her After Alcatraz Swim #2 hammering at $480,000 ($596,000 with fees), nearly double the high estimate of $300,000.
Following the recent announcement that she has become the first living woman artist to enter the Louvre collection, Marlene Dumas also attracted spirited interest for De Acteur (Portrait of Romana Vrede), though the work ultimately sold just above the low estimate at $3,125,000. Cattelan made headlines again this November, and bidders were unafraid to chase his unsettling life-size female figure trapped in bed, which sparked competition among multiple bidders and climbed past its high estimate, selling at $1,587,000 with fees. Agnes Martin’s Untitled #12, held in the same collection since acquisition, also drew healthy competition, selling for a $4.9 million hammer in the room to a single determined bidder.
But the true excitement arrived with the gleaming gold horizontal textile by Olga de Amaral, consigned from the Elaine Wynn collection, which soared immediately past its $400,000-600,000 estimate (closer to the current primary prices)—hitting $650,000 within seconds and crossing the million mark within minutes. When the bidding began to stall around $2 million, Yü-Ge Wang pressed forward, announcing that they were “not done yet.” The luminous gold tapestry ultimately hammered at $2.5 million on the phone with Ana Maria, greeted by applause, and set a new record of $3,125,000 with fees.
The Colombian artist has seen an extraordinary market rise, moving her prices from five to six digits in just a few years after Lisson Gallery took over her representation, with further momentum from her recent show at the Fondation Cartier. This result—more than five times the high estimate and more than double her previous record, set just last May when Imagen perdida 27 (1996) sold for $1.17 million at Phillips—already represented a 67 percent jump over her prior high.
As Edward Dolman of Dolman Partners and New Perspectives Art Partners told Observer at the end of the sale, the auctions this week signal a shift in taste and focus: “This week has demonstrated signs of a very strong market recovery. This is a broader and more stable market than we have seen in the last few years. However, the success of these sales has been fueled by classic material, not the contemporary work that has dominated the market more recently. Particularly with the Lauder and Weis collections, it was a case of the right material coming up at the right time. These collections, filled with blue-chip works that have been tucked away for decades, are exactly what the market was looking for.”
To Dolman, the question now is what comes next—particularly for the contemporary market. “There just isn’t enough modern art available to satiate a new generation of wealth, so where will interests turn?” he said.
The response is already evident in what soared at Sotheby’s and Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sales this week. As the results of Firelei Báez, Olga de Amaral and Amy Sherald demonstrate, beyond the ultracontemporary bubble, the strongest performances on the secondary market are coming from contemporary artists with consolidated institutional recognition—those whose place in the art-historical narrative is as secure as their rising auction trajectories.
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