BLAST #31
Kim Lim/William Turnbull – international galleries move in
Kim Lim, Relief Sculpture. Sold for 1,792,000 HKD / 228,767 USD (Est- 1,000,000 - 1,500,000 HKD)
Although the red-hot market for post-war Scottish artist William Turnbull seems to have cooled down, things have warmed up for his artist wife, the Singaporean British artist Kim Lim, who died in 1997.
Turnbull’s auction market peaked in 2015, three years after his death, when his 77-inch-tall ‘Lotus Totem’ sculpture of 1962 sold for £701,000 against a £120,000 estimate. However, in recent months several of his sculptures, estimated from £50,000 to £150,000 have gone unsold at auction. Turnbull’s estate, for long managed during his boom years by Offer Waterman in London, appears to have shifted across the Atlantic to the enterprising Karma gallery in New York, which closes a show of his early post-war work on 6 May where sculptures are priced from $150,000 to $500,000 and large paintings from $150,000 to $275,000. Perhaps Karma can help steady the ship. Turnbull’s paintings, meanwhile, previously thought to be inferior to his sculpture, have been going upwards in value. The five-foot abstract ‘20-1958’, which sold in 2006 for £66,000, sold again in 2021 for £162,500, and since then, three other large abstracts by Turnbull have sold for six-figure prices.
Kim Lim’s sculpture prices have leapfrogged since 2021 when a record £25,000 was set for her in a Modern British sale in London. Having been long overshadowed by her husband, her reputation has received significant boosts from a variety of sources recently. Lim was featured in the British Art Fair’s Crossing Borders exhibition in September 2023, followed by a major retrospective at The Hepworth Wakefield in November 2023 that was very favourably reviewed. In 2025, her estate was taken on by Axel Vervoordt, who has galleries in Belgium and Hong Kong, and she was given her first retrospective in mainland China at the seaside UCCA Dune art museum closing this February. At Sotheby’s in Hong Kong on 29 March, Lim’s 1995 16 ½-inch Portland stone carving, Relief Sculpture, sold at the top estimate for a record HK$1.8 million ($229,000/£168,000). Expect more big prices for Lim in the Asian market.
John Tunnard, Starting Point, 1960. Sold for £65,000 (estimate £30-50,000)
Tunnard survives quality test
Newcastle auctioneers Anderson & Garland made a successful leap into the Modern British market on 23 April with a sale devoted to works by the self-taught, sometime surrealist artist John Tunnard from the collection of the late Professor of Biology, Brian Whitton. Whitton was the expert on Tunnard who assembled a major reference book on the artist, together with Alan Peat, published in 1997. As a member of the vetting committee at the British Art Fair, I was used to referring Tunnards to Whitton for authentication, but I was not aware of how many works he actually owned and had bought, either at auction or after an auction when they had gone unsold. The auction catalogue was, as one might expect from a specialist collector, a fount of knowledge on provenance and anecdotal background on individual works.
The interesting thing about the collection was that only a handful of works were top drawer; the rest were a mixed bunch of earlier or atypical works that only an expert would find interesting. Nonetheless with a total pre-sale estimate of £240,000 (not including buyer’s premium) all but 29 of the 32 lots sold for a 25% premium inclusive £406,000.
Top lot was an elaborately framed surreal abstract, Painting 1948, from his peak post-war period, which had been bought from Offer Waterman in 2003 and sold above estimate for £75,000. Coming second with an above estimate of £65,000 was a later work, Starting Point 1960, painted with detectable references to France’s first nuclear bomb explosion in the Sahara Desert. Whitton bought the painting in 2003 from dealer Peter Nahum who had acquired it at auction in 1999 for £5,200.
One of the earliest works on offer was a Miroesque Composition, 1937, which Whitton had bought in New York in 1999 for $8.050. Back at auction with a £20,000 estimate, it sold comfortably for £32,500. The later work from the sixties, which flirted with lunar exploration themes were less sought after. Whitton bought a 1969 watercolour, Vision (of Moon Craters), after it had gone unsold at Christie’s in 1996 with a £2,000 estimate. Back with a £5,000 estimate and perhaps hoping for some residual interest from the Artemis 11 moon journey, there was not sufficient interest, and it went unsold again.
Desmond Morris, Headmistress, 2023. £3,500
Redfern moves to The Mall
An exhibition, Then and Now, marked the opening of the new Redfern Gallery in Pall Mall on 16 April.
The old gallery opened 103 years ago in Cork Street, where it helped to launch and maintain the careers of innumerable artists. Redfern was the first gallery to showcase the carvings of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, and in 1929, the first exhibition of British Linocuts by the Grosvenor School artists – Sybil Andrews, Cyril Edward Power and their instructor, Claude Flight. Among the post-war British artists it promoted were Patrick Heron, Victor Pasmore, Alan Reynolds, Mary Fedden, Paul Feiler, and Adrian Heath – a veritable Who’s Who of Modern British Art, most of whom the gallery has displayed at the British Art Fair since it was founded in 1989. In the 1960s, Redfern became the launch pad for a new generation of artists, starting with a Patrick Procktor sell-out and including several artists who have recently been granted institutional retrospective – namely William Gear (Towner), Paul Feiler (Jerwood), Margaret Mellis (Towner), David Tindle (Huddersfield Art Gallery), and Eileen Agar (Whitechapel).
Most of these artists, and more, were given wall space at the new gallery. Artists in attendance included Sarah Armstrong-Jones, John Carter, Sam Chatto, Leigh Davis, Ellie Ekserdjian, Paul Emsley, Florence Hutchings, Allen Jones, Ffiona Lewis, Danny Markey, Brendan Neiland, William Pye, Telfer Stokes. Among the first to sell were two paintings by the surrealist Desmond Morris, priced in the lower thousands, who died on the very same day, aged 98.