Art News: Artists at Auction in 2026, from Olafur Eliasson and Frank Bowling to Alfred Wallis

The 2026 auctions in London and New York put some very different artists side by side, from the self-taught St Ives painter Alfred Wallis to the London watercolourist Joseph Yaeger, whose painting made £645,000 in October. This autumn we added 144 artists from these sales at Christie's, Phillips and Sotheby's to our A to Z of artists. Here are the names people look up most, and what their work did. Prices include the buyer's premium. Sotheby's shows its London prices only to signed-in users, so we give none for those lots.

The top prices of October

Joseph Yaeger's Once, always made £645,000 at Phillips' London evening sale on 15 October, more than three times its top estimate of £180,000. Born in Montana in 1986 and based in London, Yaeger paints in watercolour on thickly gessoed linen, often from film stills. In the same sale, Turisti by Maurizio Cattelan, the Italian artist behind the banana taped to a wall, Comedian, made £212,850.

At Phillips' day sale on 17 October, Donna sullo sgabello (Woman on a stool) by the Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto made £412,800, more than double its top estimate. Emily Kam Kngwarray (c.1914–1996), the senior Anmatyerr painter from Utopia in the Northern Territory, made £126,420 with My Country, and the Emirati conceptual artist Hassan Sharif £122,550 with Slippers. Jack Goldstein, of the Pictures Generation, made £116,100.

Cai Guo-Qiang, who makes his drawings by igniting gunpowder, made £96,750, and Igshaan Adams, who weaves beads, rope and wire in Cape Town, made £96,000 at Christie's with The certainty of being a rose (ii). Olafur Eliasson, best known for The Weather Project at Tate Modern, made £83,850 with Protosolar times (frozen), well above its estimate of £50,000 to £70,000.

British artists at auction

Frank Bowling, the Guyana-born painter of the Map paintings and the first Black artist elected a Royal Academician, made £64,500 at Phillips with While Thinking of TC and Clem Again, a little under its estimate. Alfred Wallis (1855–1942) made £34,830 with Ships and Lighthouse, Houses, above its estimate. Alfred Wallis paintings are self-taught pictures of boats and harbours, made from memory in ship's paint on scraps of cardboard.

Alfred Wallis, St Ives, about 1928. Photo: Sailko, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Among British painters, Castle XXXVI by Bob Law made £38,700, William Monk £30,720 at Christie's, Corridor by Tony Bevan £28,380 and The Lych Gate by George Shaw £12,900. Shaw paints the Coventry council estate where he grew up, in the Humbrol enamel sold for model kits. Sotheby's October sales in London included Michael Andrews (1928–1995), Nigel Cooke, Catherine Goodman, co-founder of the Royal Drawing School, and the Scottish painter Callum Innes.

Sculpture and ceramics stood out among the British names in Sotheby's Contemporary Day Auction on 25 June. The sale offered Richard Long, the Bristol artist who makes his work from walking, Mona Hatoum, Phyllida Barlow (1944–2023), who represented Britain at Venice in 2017, Rana Begum, Annie Morris and David Nash, the sculptor of charred wood and living trees.

David Nash, Seventy One Steps, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, August 2011. Photo: Neil Theasby, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Lucie Rie pottery and Edmund de Waal ceramics were offered there too. Lucie Rie (1902–1995) was the Vienna-born studio potter known for refined bowls and bottles and experimental glazes, and Edmund de Waal, who makes porcelain installations in vitrines, is also the author of The Hare with Amber Eyes. The fashion photographer Nick Knight and the painter Sandra Blow were in the sale as well.

Contemporary artists

The same June sale makes a good list of international names. Beatriz Milhazes, the Rio de Janeiro painter of dazzling, layered abstractions, had four lots, as did the Austrian sculptor Franz West (1947–2012). Bruce Nauman, Sarah Sze, Mamma Andersson, Wilhelm Sasnal, Howardena Pindell, Deborah Roberts, Lisa Yuskavage, Shirazeh Houshiary, Charline von Heyl and the Gutai artist Atsuko Tanaka were all offered too.

So was Geoffrey Holder (1930–2014), the Trinidad-born dancer and actor who played Baron Samedi in the James Bond film Live and Let Die and was also a prolific painter. In October, Carroll Dunham, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Camille Henrot, Hermann Nitsch, Wade Guyton and the Brazilian artist Mira Schendel all sold in Sotheby's London day sale, and the Danish painter Per Kirkeby in its evening sale. At Phillips, an untitled work by Jordan Wolfson made £12,900.

Up and coming artists

Phillips' day sale included many younger painters. Windows of Emotion by Emma Prempeh made £36,120, No Leloni by Kaloki Nyamai £32,250, Spring by Poppy Jones £29,670, above its estimate of £10,000 to £20,000, and Bony Ramirez's And Is it My Fault if the Coconuts Don't Sell £21,930. Jemima Murphy and Anna Freeman Bentley each made £15,480, Rachel Jones and Louis Fratino £9,030 each, and Tomo Campbell £7,740. Sanya Kantarovsky, Yu Nishimura, Izumi Kato and Sarah Ball were in June's Sotheby's sale.

The same Phillips sale had a South Asia section, with Ram Kumar at £41,280, Sohan Qadri at £32,250, Ganesh Haloi at £20,640 and The Wings by Ganesh Pyne at £19,350.

James Ensor, Giacomo Balla and the print sales

Older names turned up too. Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), the Italian Futurist, made £32,250 at Phillips with Velocità di motocicletta. In New York on 21 October, Christie's sold four prints by James Ensor (1860–1949) for $65,280 between them. Ensor was the Ostend painter and printmaker of carnival masks and skeletons.

James Ensor, Skeletons Fighting over a Hanged Man, 1891, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. Public domain (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons.

The New York print sales at Christie's and Sotheby's brought Robert Mangold at $20,480, Pat Steir at $19,840, Jennifer Bartlett at $17,920, Martin Lewis at $15,360 and Louise Nevelson at $8,320, with three prints by John Cage making $12,800 together. Prints by Carmen Herrera, Georges Rouault, Ewa Juszkiewicz and Claudio Bravo each sold for under $4,000.

If you own work by these artists

Each of these artists has a profile in our A to Z, with their biography and what a buyer checks before bidding. The results above show how far a price can land from its estimate in either direction, so a realistic valuation matters before you choose a sale. If you own work by any of them and are thinking of selling, send us photographs for a free valuation. There is no obligation to sell, and we act for you rather than for the saleroom.

Cover: Alfred Wallis, Noah's Ark, before 1942, Zander Collection, Cologne. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.