Sandro CHIA

The market for contemporary art may be shrinking everywhere else, but in Italy both value and volume sales are booming. In the first half of 2003, Italy accounted for 5% of the market by value and 19.6% by volume, with 1,085 lots generating sales worth EUR 2.2 million.

FIAC, France’s biggest contemporary art fair, runs from 9-13 October 2003, with 174 galleries and an estimated 70,000 collectors expected to attend. With doors due to open in a few days, Artprice takes the pulse of one of the market’s most volatile segments.

The 1980s saw a resurgence of figurative painting in Europe with the German New Fauves, the French Figuration Libre movement and the Italian Transavanguardia that was quickly taken up by the art market at the time. But with Christie’s Rome holding its “Arte Moderna e Contemporanea” auction on 18 December 2002, how do collectors rate these recent Italian figurists today?