Private sales are becoming one of the art market’s most consequential channels — and the auction houses are treating them less like a backroom service than a strategic centerpiece.
In mid-March, just before Sotheby’s modern and contemporary evening sale in London, the house opened “The Apartment,” an invitation-only selling exhibition staged as a domestic tableau. Around $40 million worth of art and design filled the room, including works by David Hockney, George Condo, Gerhard Richter, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, alongside furniture by Rose Uniacke. By the time the exhibition was nearing its close, roughly half of the 12 works had already sold. One wall even showed a blank patch of white paint where a Warhol dollar sign had been removed by its new owner.
The format was designed to make collectors imagine the works in situ. Two hundred of Sotheby’s top clients received invitations in the form of a key inside a box. David Rothschild, who has since been promoted to global lead of private selling exhibitions, said the goal was to create momentum and encourage buyers to picture the works in their homes.
Sotheby’s has been leaning harder into that model for years. The house said it generated a record $1.5 billion in private sales in 2020 and has since banked between $1.1 billion and $1.3 billion privately each year, or about a quarter of its annual sales. Since moving from New York to London in 2024, Rothschild has curated four selling shows there, including the first and second editions of “The Apartment,” which he said were a “very successful financial venture” and were worth a combined $340 million. Sotheby’s also has private exhibitions planned for Zurich in June, timed to Art Basel, and Paris in October.
Christie’s is following a similar path. The house said its three most expensive paintings sold in 2025 were all private sales, and that it traded $1.5 billion in art privately that year, just under a quarter of its global sales. Seventeen of those works sold for more than $15 million, and half of the buyers were new to the channel. Christie’s top auction result last year was Mark Rothko’s 1958 painting, “No. 31 (Yellow Stripe),” which sold for $62.1 million in New York.
Adrian Meyer, Christie’s global head of private sales, said the appeal lies in a market defined by volatility. Private sales, he said, offer reassurance, security, and confidentiality — and, crucially, a known outcome. Phillips has also reported strong growth, with private sales up 66 percent last year and total volume doubled since 2020.
As the auction calendar grows more unpredictable, the discreet sale is looking less like an alternative and more like the market’s preferred form of certainty.
