Market Brief: Gina Beavers’s Sculptural Paintings Make Waves at Fairs and Auctions
The latest
Collector interest in Gina Beavers’s irreverent, sculpturally rendered paintings of somewhat grotesque foods, hyperrealistic body parts, and elaborate makeup has skyrocketed these past two months. Last week, Marianne Boesky Gallery nearly sold out its solo presentation of the Athens-born, New Jersey–based artist’s work on the opening day of Frieze London, with works selling for prices between $20,000 and $60,000. And last month, the artist’s acrylic and modeling paste on canvas work Based on Milk by Marlies Plank (2019) broke the artist’s auction record at Phillips’s “New Now” sale in New York, where it doubled its high estimate to sell for $30,240.
Key figures
- The chart above shows Beavers’s auction records over time, beginning with her secondary-market debut in December 2018 at an online Christie’s sale. The artist’s painting Getting Ready to Juice! (2012), featuring a combination of fruits and vegetables in a cornflower blue bowl, fell short of its $2,500 low estimate, selling for $1,625.
- Beavers’s secondary market has been steadily building since that debut. In April 2019—a month after her first museum solo show opened at MoMA PS1—Beavers’s realistic acrylic on linen piece Portable Palette (2017) fetched a hammer price of SEK 95,000 ($10,241) at the Swedish auction house Bukowskis. Though the painting failed to reach its low estimate of SEK 120,000 ($12,981), it did mark the first five-figure result for Beavers’s work on the secondary market. She signed with Marianne Boesky three months later.
- The auction record for Beavers’s work surpassed $20,000 the following year, when her purply painting Candy Ombré Lips (2015) sold for $21,250 at a Phillips sale in September 2020. This past March, her auction record was broken yet again with the $25,200 sale of the triptych Clowning Makeup Inspiration (2015) at Sotheby’s in New York. In the interim, Beavers had solo exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York and at Various Small Fires’s Seoul outpost.
- Beavers’s sculptural paintings have tended to achieve similar prices on the primary market. At this year’s edition of The Armory Show, Carl Kostyál Gallery sold two 2021 paintings by Beavers, Lip Stain and Retro Lipstick Ad, both for $22,000.
Takeaway
Demand for Beavers’s work on Artsy has paralleled recent interest on the primary and secondary markets. The number of collectors inquiring about Beavers’s compositions on Artsy rose gradually over the past six years before surging in 2021. Thus far this year, that number has already more than doubled from 2020, making it the artist’s biggest year on the platform. One of her prints is currently available as part of the current ART FOR CHANGE exhibition on Artsy benefiting the nonprofit GrowNYC. Her work is also the focus of a solo exhibition at the Neuer Essener Kunstverein in Germany through November. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and Pérez Art Museum Miami, thanks to a promised gift from trendsetting collector Jorge Pérez. Between the support from influential galleries, major museums, and important collectors, expect demand for Beavers’s work to keep rising.
