The Most In-Demand Artists on Artsy in October 2021
The chart above shows the artists who had the biggest month-over-month increases in the number of collectors inquiring about their work on Artsy in October.
One of the artists who saw the largest increase in attention from collectors on Artsy was Deborah Roberts. Roberts, known for her distinctive mixed-media collage portraits of Black children, is gaining attention on both the primary and secondary markets. At Frieze London last month, Stephen Friedman Gallery sold out its solo booth of works by Roberts (all in the range of $125,000 to $150,000) by the end of the fair’s first preview day. The artist’s portraits are also beginning to gain a foothold on the secondary market; Roberts’s work has regularly outperformed estimates since making its debut at auction in July 2020. Her current auction record was set this past June by Serenade (2017), a fractured mixed-media work of a young girl wearing a tulle headdress, which sold for $119,700—nearly double its low estimate—at a Phillips sale in New York. Since then, two more works by Roberts have surfaced at auction, but have only achieved prices in the low five-figure range. However, that six-figure record stands to be broken this month when a collaged work from Roberts’s “Nessun Dorma” series, I Do Solemnly Swear (2018), goes up for auction on November 12th in New York at a Christie’s post-war and contemporary art day sale with a $100,000 to $150,000 estimate.
Meanwhile, collector demand for works by the painter Mark Yang—who was born in Seoul, and now spends time between his home city and Brooklyn—tripled on Artsy last month. This uptick came on the heels of Yang’s appearance in Various Small Fires’s presentation at the Korea International Art Fair (KIAF) in Seoul last month. The gallery, which displayed one of the rare solo booths at KIAF, sold out of the artist’s work on the first day of the fair. A new series of paintings by Yang are currently being exhibited through November 20th in the artist’s second-ever solo gallery show at and Milk, which is a new project space located within Various Small Fires’s Los Angeles location. The new series builds on Yang’s practice of creating highly stylized physical paintings that depict Asian men wrestling in the nude as a way to examine his identity as an immigrant and a Korean American man.
