A 68-million-year-old Triceratops skull was among the opening day sales at Frieze Masters on Wednesday. The skull, discovered in Montana in 2019, was priced at £650,000 with David Aaron and sold to a new client, a private collector.
“We’ve had a strong opening to the fair including the sale of a sub-adult Triceratops skull on opening night, among other pieces from our exhibition,” says Salomon Aaron, a director at David Aaron. “Dinosaur fossils are iconic and exceptional examples of this high quality are still grossly undervalued relative to other art categories.”
Works at Frieze Masters are not always prohibitively expensive, and sometimes showing works in the low hundreds of pounds can pay dividends. The antiquities dealer Charles Ede took the approach of showing a collection of small drawings by the 19th-century French artist Alexandre-Louis Leloir, bought as a sketchbook. Hung as a gallery wall, the drawings were priced between around £150 and £10,500. Twenty sold on opening day, with more sales yesterday after the gallery rehung.
The New York-based dealer Christine Berry, co-owner of Berry Campbell, observes that the key in today’s selective market is “to think about price point, good paintings for good prices… we have to keep things moving”. Exhibiting in the fair’s Spotlight section, Berry presented a solo show of the US painter Janice Biala, with prices ranging from $20,000 to $95,000. By Thursday morning, Berry had sold four paintings, priced from $18,000 to $55,000, with another on hold for a museum. “This is our third year [at Frieze Masters], but it’s our best yet,” Berry says.
Another painter, Anne Rothenstein, is the subject of a solo show with Stephen Friedman Gallery. Her paintings also proved popular, with five selling to private collectors from Europe and the US, priced from £40,000 to £75,000.
Hauser & Wirth has so far publicly reported the only seven-figure deals at Frieze Masters. One of the most valuable works announced before the event—Hercules as a Gladiator by Peter Paul Rubens, priced at €7.5m with Salomon Lilian—had not sold at the time of writing.