Prague, Feb 21 (CTK) – Last year was the most successful at the Czech art auction market in modern history, Robert Meckovsky, who wrote the ART+ yearbook that described the auction market in 2016, told journalists yesterday.
This was largely due to high-quality artifacts being put up for auction and the collectors ready to spend large sums on exceptional works of art, Meckovsky said.
For the first time since the early 1990s, the volume of the auction market exceeded 1 billion crowns, having reached 1.257 billion crowns, he added.
Another 250 million crowns, spent on Czech artifacts abroad, must be added to the turnover of domestic auctions, Meckovsky said.
“We do not know who bought them, but we presume that these were Czech collectors,” he added.
The total growth was reflected in the increasing average price of the sold artifacts. Last year, the average price rose from 44,500 crowns to 57,000 crowns, Meckovsky said, adding that increasingly expensive items were being sold.
At present, it is much easier to sell a painting worth several thousand crowns or a million than those worth tens of thousands crowns, Meckovsky said.
There was also an increasing interest in the artifacts with medium prices. Last year, a buyer was found for 41 percent of the offered items, which was 70 percent of the volume of the offered prices.
A total of 198 items were sold for over one million crowns each.
As against the previous year, the total turnover of Czech art auctions rose by 331 million crowns, or 36 percent.
In the previous year, the annual growth was never higher than 100 million crowns.
After three years, the top ten items also considerably changed, including a new record in the Czech Republic, Meckovsky said.
Four new items were added. Along with the painting Series CI by Frantisek Kupka, sold for 62 million crowns, which became a new record of Czech auction, there were also a painting by Oskar Kokoschka and two canvases by Josef Sima sold for over 20 million crowns.
Before this, only the picture Sleeping by Toyen was sold for 20 million crowns in 2009.
($1=25.449 crowns)
