Thomas DEMAND

Twenty years ago Berlin was internationally recognised as an eldorado for art galleries and artists. The city radiated an atmosphere of tremendous vitality and incommensurate freedom and with lots of huge spaces for artistic expression. The Berlin of the 1990s is remembered as an unparalleled creative laboratory… a sort of giant uninterrupted party with a […]

Every year, nearly 3,000 artists have their first work(s) sold at auction. This first sale is a significant step because for most people the prices they command represent a sort of benchmark which follows them throughout their career. Galleries find it less easy to support their favourite artists if the latter have not shown the capacity to generate sufficiently strong performances in the public auction arena. Likewise, a strong auction performance is an ideal trampoline for guaranteeing the success of future exhibitions on the primary market.So who got started in 2007? Artprice looks at the top 50 new entrants.

A wave of enthusiasm among younger generation collectors has driven contemporary photography prices up by 92% in less than six years, an annual growth rate of more than 12.7%. This kind of speculative rally used to be the preserve of big name German and US photographers, but in the last few months the market seems to have been led by less renowned artists of other nationalities.