Artnet Auctions Puts Photography Pioneers and David Hockney in Focus as the Ultra-Contemporary Market Recalibrates
Two sales now live at Artnet Auctions offer a compact survey of how artists reshape a medium — and how the market decides which names endure. Trailblazers in Photography is open through June 30, while Contemporary Art opens June 30 and runs through July 14.
The photography sale is built around artists who pushed the form beyond documentation. German artists Bernd Becher (1931–2007) and Hilla Becher (1934–2015) turned water towers, blast furnaces, and other industrial structures into carefully ordered typologies, a method that helped define the Düsseldorf School and influenced artists including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer. Their work treated repetition as a kind of visual argument: the subject was not the building alone, but the system behind it.
American artist Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) took a different route. Her “Untitled Film Stills” look like frames from mid-century cinema, yet the films never existed. By acting as photographer, director, stylist, and subject, Sherman built fictional identities that unsettled familiar ideas about women and representation.
American photographer William Eggleston (b. 1939) changed the medium from another angle. His 1976 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) helped establish color photography as a serious artistic form, despite a hostile critical response. What once seemed mundane — tricycles, ceilings, roadside scenes — became, in Eggleston’s hands, a case for the expressive force of the everyday.
The printmaking section centers on British artist David Hockney (b. 1937), whose recent death has prompted renewed attention to a practice that was never secondary to his career. Over more than seven decades, Hockney moved from Xerox prints to paper pulp works made with master printer Ken Tyler, then to iPad and iPhone images that translated his eye for color into a digital register. The “Moving Focus” series from the 1980s extended printmaking into installation, underscoring his habit of treating each new tool as a challenge rather than a constraint.
The market commentary is more guarded. The ultra-contemporary segment expanded rapidly after the 2008 crash, then overheated and broke apart. The recovery, the article suggests, will not be broad-based. It is more likely to reward artists with lasting collector demand than those whose prices were driven mainly by resale momentum. In that sense, the sales reflect a larger shift in the market: a move away from speed and toward durability.
