Art Market
Mehretu's painting Untitled 1 sold for $US1,022,500 at Sotheby's in September 2010. It's estimated value had been $600–$800,000.
Mehretu is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery in New York and by White Cube in London as well as by carlier gebauer in Berlin.
In 2010, Mehretu's work was the object of the Lehmann v. The Project Worldwide case before the New York Supreme Court. The case involved legal issues over her work and the right of first refusal contracts between her then-gallery and a collector. In return for a $75,000 loan by the collector Jean-Pierre Lehmann to the Project Gallery, made in February 2001, the gallery was to give Lehmann a right of first refusal on any work by any artist the gallery represented, and at a 30 per cent discount until the loan was repaid. According to Lehmann, the loan was primarily designed to buy access to works by Mehretu. However, the agreement between Lehmann and The Project expressly provided that four other individuals also have the right of first choice to any work by any artist represented by the gallery. The gallery sold 40 works by Mehretu during the period of the contract, and only one was offered first to Lehmann. Lehmann suspected that his agreement was not being honoured after seeing several large paintings by Mehretu belonging to other collectors in an exhibition at the Walker Art Center and sued for breach of contract. The case, eventually won by the collector, reveiled to a wider public precisely what prices and discounts galleries offer various collectors and galleries on paintings by Mehretu - information normally concealed by the art world. It also was the first case to try to enforce the right to buy contemporary art.
Read more about this topic: Julie Mehretu
Famous quotes containing the words art and/or market:
“Come, Kate, thou art perfect in lying down.
Come, quick, quick, that I may lay my head in thy lap.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruit, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)