Prague, Feb 28 (CTK) – Art collectors and investors spent 1.42 billion crowns in the Czech art auction market in 2017, which is almost 13 percent more than in 2016, Jan Skrivanek, from the Artplus.cz server, told CTK on Wednesday.
Some 10,000 works of art were sold in 2017, which is about one half of those that were on offer.
Within the past ten years, the turnover of Czech art auctions more than doubled.
Just like in 2016, the maximum auction price rose for works of Czech painters Jan Zrzavy (1890-1977), Vaclav Spala (1885-1946) and Jan Bauch (1898-1995), some of the best represented authors in the Czech auctions in the long term.
While Josef Sima’s (1891-1971) paintings were sold for more than 20 million crowns in 2016, two works by Jindrich Styrsky (1899-1942) were sold for 24.3 and 23.5 million crowns and one work by Toyen (1902-1980) was sold for 36 million crowns in 2017. These sums include an auction fee of 20-25 percent of the price achieved in the auction hall.
The rising prices’ trend is confirmed by the higher number of art works that were sold for millions and hundreds of thousands of crowns in 2017, that is 17 percent and 3 percent more year-on-year, respectively.
Although the art works that cost millions of crowns make up only about 2 percent of the overall number of the sold works, they contribute with 62 percent to the overall turnover.
The highest prices are paid for the Art Moderne and art dating from around the year 1900 as well as post-war art. Out of the total of 230 works of art sold for millions of crowns in 2017, 30 were from these periods.
It is unclear whether the Czech auction market will grow further.
According to Skrivanek, the market oscillates in two to three-year cycles and, despite changes of turnover and best sold authors, the fundamental trends remain the same. Since the past two years saw a record high of the overall turnovers, it is likely that the market is going to slow down now, he said.
