Australian auction house Deutscher and Hackett has sold a collection of 10 works by renowned British artist Bridget Riley for AU$1.5 million at their August 28 auction in Sydney. All 10 sold for above the pre-sale estimate, but the star of the show was Riley’s Op-art painting “OFF, 1963,” which sold for a whopping AU$984,000 against an estimate of AU$60,000-$80,000. “OFF, 1963” went to a phone bidder while the remaining nine works were sold to another phone bidder.
The 10 Riley works were sold from the collection of the famous fashion illustrator Alfredo Gonzalez and his late partner Lex Aitken, which added to their desirability. Gonzalez was based in London for most of his career but retired to Australia in 1985, and later became an Australian citizen. The Lex Aitken and Alfredo (Bouret) Gonzalez collection consisted of 56 works and accounted for nearly one third of the August 28 sale.
The price achieved for the relatively small “OFF, 1963” is well above what Riley’s smaller works usually achieve. It is, however, not surprising that there was so much competition for this painting considering that it is an early work from the most celebrated period of Riley’s career and has been with the same owners since it was acquired directly from the artist.
Riley is considered by many to be Britain’s greatest living painter and was recently named the third best-selling living female artist by Artnet and Bloomberg. The auction record for Riley was achieved in 2008, when the artist’s first essay in pure colour, “Chant 2,” (1967), sold for £2,561,250 (US$5.1 million).
