Uli Sigg is offloading his Howard Arkley. Asking price, $1m-plus
A suburban interior in brash, throbbing colours by the late Australian artist Howard Arkley has been consigned by one of the world’s biggest art collectors and features as the cover lot of Sydney’s next major art auction.
Neapolitan delight, 1993, will be offered in Deutscher + Hackett’s auction of Important Australian and International Fine Art in Sydney on May 7.
The work comes from the Uli Sigg Collection, Switzerland, and carries the catalogue’s highest pre-sale estimate of $1 million to $1.5 million on the hammer. It measures an imposing 172.5 x 254 cm.
If bidding drives the price towards the high estimate, Arkley’s Australian auction record of $1,534,090 (including buyer’s premium) set by Menzies auction house in 2019 will be shattered.
The consignor of Neapolitan delight, Swiss-born businessman and diplomat Uli Sigg, 78, acquired the work from Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne in April 1994.
Sigg was Switzerland’s ambassador to China, North Korea and Mongolia from 1995 to 1998. An avid sinophile, Sigg brought together a collection of contemporary Chinese art so extensive that in 2012 he was able to donate 1463 artworks to help establish Hong Kong’s vast M+ public art gallery, which opened in 2021.
The huge cache of works included 26 by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei alone.
The Art Newspaper reported at the time that the Sigg donation to M+ was valued at $US163 million. The director of M+ was and still is Suhanya Raffel, a former deputy director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales under recently departed director Michael Brand.
Australia’s connections with Uli Sigg are strong.
In 2012 the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, teamed with the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (instigated by Sydney-based former gallery owner Gene Sherman) to stage the exhibition, Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture.
Arkley was already dead by then. The artist died of a heroin overdose in his studio at the age of 48, a couple of days after returning from representing Australia at the 1999 Venice Biennale.
Asked why Sigg might be selling his huge Arkley, Deutscher + Hackett’s Damian Hackett said the painting was “possibly an outlier” in Sigg’s Asian-oriented collection
“In terms of his whole collection it may have been a bit out of place,” Hackett said. “But it’s not out of place here. It’s electric. It will stop traffic. It’s classic, classic Howard Arkley.”
The Melbourne auction viewing is on now until Sunday and all the artworks will then move to Sydney for viewing between May 1 and May 6.
The auction brings forward 76 artworks at a total estimate range of between $8.4 million and $11,750,000 (not taking into account buyer’s premium of 25 per cent).
By this measure, the sale is poised to rival the current largest auction of art in Australia this year – Smith and Singer’s sale of Important Australian Art on April 8, which realised a total of $10,674,204 including buyer’s premium, according to Australian Art Sales Digest.
The first eight lots in the Deutscher + Hackett catalogue are from the one private collection in Melbourne. They include two suitably misty paintings by Melbourne tonalist painter Clarice Beckett, jaunty linocuts by artists Ethel Spowers, Dorrit Black and Eveline Syme, and a painting in oil on canvas by Alice Bale titled The doorway, 1913.
Lot 9 is an Arthur Streeton painting first shown in 1889 at the now legendary 9 by 5 Impressionism Exhibition in Melbourne, where the triumvirate of Streeton, Charles Conder and Tom Roberts dominated the showing. Streeton contributed 41 paintings.
The 9 by 5 of the exhibition title referred to the size of the boards the artists had painted on. The Streeton looking for a new home is Brander’s Ferry, 1889, in oil on cardboard and dated incorrectly by the artist as 1884.
This anomaly occurred when a former owner of the picture asked Streeton to sign it, and the artist got the year wrong.
Brander’s Ferry might be small, but its estimate is a healthy $500,000 to $700,000.