Thursday, May 21, 2009

Auction: Photographie, May 27 and 28, 2009 @Lempertz

Lempertz begins the German photography season with its sales May 27 and 28 in Cologne. The main Photography sale takes place on the 27th, with the Contemporary Art sale (which includes some photography) the following day. A great feature of their printed Photography catalog is that it includes all of the photo lots in the Contemporary Art sale as well, all in one place. So for the purposes of our statistical measures, we've combined the two auctions and will consider them as one big group. Between the two sales, there are a total of 238 lots on offer, with a total High estimate of 648450€. (Catalog cover at right.)

Here's the breakdown (Lempertz often only gives one estimate figure rather than a range, so for our purposes we use this single number as the high estimate):

Total Low lots (high estimate 7500€ or lower): 222
Total Low estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): 460450€

Total Mid lots (high estimate between 7500€ and 35000€): 16
Total Mid estimate: 188000€

Total High lots (high estimate over 35000€): 0
Total High estimate: NA

For our collection, we liked the following:
  • Lot 27 Umbo, Gaswerk in San Francisco, 1952
  • Lot 185 Carla Van De Puttelaar, Untitled, 2004
  • Lot 313 Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gasbehalter, Grube Anna Bei Achen, 1965
  • Lot 428 Ola Kolehmainen, See, What You See, 2007
  • Lot 580 Hiroshi Sugimoto, Satellite City Towers, 2002
The lot by lot Photography catalog (lots 1-207) can be found here. The Contemporary Art catalog (which contains the other 31 lots of photography) can be found here.


May 28
Neumarkt 3
50667 Koln

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