Bloomberg Pursuits has been highlighting artists on the rise as part of an ongoing look at art as an investment.
Museum wall text regularly includes a work’s title, date, dimensions, and oftentimes, if the object is on loan, the name of its owner.
Occasionally the owner prefers to be anonymous, in which case the work is listed as coming from a “Private Collection,” but anyone browsing the Whitney Museum’s midcareer retrospective of the painter Laura Owens will observe that many lenders have made their names public.
Some of those names are obscure. Others will be familiar to those with a knowledge of the international jet set: Martin Eisenberg, a co-founder of Bed Bath & Beyond, Inc., and his wife Rebecca lent three paintings to the show; the Ringiers, a Swiss publishing family, have five works on view. Other paintings have been lent by the billionaire François Pinault, the photographer Mario Testino, and the billionaire pharmaceutical heiress Maja Hoffmann, who lent one 14-foot-wide work and a series of 33 small paintings from 2012. The foundation of megacollector Peter Brant, meanwhile, has lent three paintings, while one of his sons has lent another, and yet another two are listed as a “private collection, courtesy of the Brant Foundation.”
This is a collector base that most artists could only dream of. But despite having the attention (and money) of this high-profile group of influential buyers, Owens, until recently, was rarely known outside of a tight-knit coterie of art-world insiders. “It’s all within a small group of people,” says the adviser Lisa Schiff. “Not every great collector was interested in Laura Owens, but there was a core group that was big enough and competitive enough.”
Thanks to a conflation of events—critical, institutional, and commercial—it seems that group is about to become a lot larger.
Glowing Reviews, Exploding Prices
In October she was the subject of a glowing profile in the New Yorker (“Owens had hit on a necessarily willful new direction—not exactly forward, but fruitfully sideways—for painting, my favorite art form,” writes the art critic Peter Schjeldahl), and her retrospective at the Whitney was met with similarly gushing reviews (the New York Times’ critic Roberta Smith notes that “her work has a playful, knowing, almost-Rococo lightness of being”).
On the heels of that opening, a work by Owens came to auction at Sotheby’s postwar and contemporary evening sale with a high estimate of $300,000 and was bought for nearly twice that amount, selling, with a premium, for $1.755 million. “I think her work is worth every penny,” says the adviser Thea Westreich, who donated two works to the Whitney museum that are included in the show. “It just seems like it’s taken people a long time to get here.”
Her Evolution