Blouin Artinfo’s Judd Tully reports that a Gerhard Richter at Pace’s Art Basel booth sold today for an undisclosed sum. The work, an abstract from 1986 titled A.B. Courbet, was listed for an undisclosed sum over $20 million.
The public rarely hears about sales that high at art fairs. This past spring at the Armory Fair here in New York, Tokyo’s Galerie Sho Contemporary Art offered an abstract Richter for $13.5 million–though Shoichiro Satake, of that gallery, said he had no expectations of selling it, when we asked him about the likelihood that it would sell. The work was mainly meant to grab eyes, he said, as is the case with most big-ticket items at fairs.
The Pace Richter actually wasn’t the highest valued piece at Basel. Bloomberg’s Scott Reyburn reported yesterday that that honor went to a $78 million Mark Rothko in the London-based Marlborough Fine Art booth.
