The great pretender

From The Sunday Times

February 18, 2007

How can a struggling artist meet the big buyers? Russell Thoburn tells Kate Spicer how he blagged his way in

For the artist Russell Thoburn, it was not enough just to be at the private view. He wanted an invitation to the all-important after-party, those exclusive little drinks, dinners and hikes to the Groucho Club to which only the really important players in the art world are invited — he wanted the art equivalent of an “access all areas” backstage pass.

After the private view for Damien Hirst’s In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida show at Tate Britain in 2004, he rang Hirst’s press people and asked what was happening next. Nothing, they said. Thoburn knew better. When he saw the hot gallerist Maureen Paley leaving with the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, he followed that cab. Even though he lost sight of their taxi, they were so near the art-world dining room, St John, he assumed — correctly — that this was their destination. Saying he was “with Damien”, he went through and sat down as if he belonged.

“It was less than 50 people, but everyone was there. It was like watching telly. They were all faces or big collectors. I felt a bit nervous. At one point, a well-known gallerist looked over, and we had one of those five-second looks, but she didn’t say anything. Imagine the embarrassment had someone approached me, only to discover Damien had indeed asked me. There’s always an air of ambiguity.”

Over the past three years, Thoburn, 36, has become an expert in penetrating the art world’s more exclusive get-togethers. He has enjoyed “sublime” bottles of wine at the Groucho and brushed shoulders with Ozzy Osbourne and Jude Law. Yet this unassuming figure, wearing tidy jeans with jumper and jacket, is not some party animal desperate to get close to the A list. All Thoburn wanted was to gain access to the few power players who decide an artist’s fate. “My frustration was that I knew my art and my ideas were good, but I didn’t know the right people,” he laughs. “Or hadn’t slept with the right person.”

“The thing about the art world,” he says, “is that it is a game, and people use different strategies. How, as Russell Thoburn, was I going to get tickets to something like the Frieze Art Fair private view? Not even exhibiting artists are invited to that. I thought, ‘Who is trendy, or popular, with links to the art world?’ I came up with Alex James of Blur. He studied at Goldsmiths and was definitely around that lot. I set up an e-mail address in his name and, before long, Frieze had sent me a VIP pack.

“The parties are significant: very, exceedingly. That’s where it all happens. At private views, everyone is networking. I didn’t feel guilty. Once in, I was Russell Thoburn.” Thoburn accepts that he comes from out-sidethe sphere of influence. “The way to succeed is to be an artist’s assistant, like the Chapman brothers were to Gilbert and George,” he says. “It helps to have the Royal College [of Art]’s stamp of approval, which works like an old boys’ network of sorts. The era when I came down to London was very Goldsmiths-driven. But my tutors didn’t have the connections. Saatchi never bought anything from Sir John Cass, my college — it was totally off radar. And I wasn’t going to tiptoe round and get an internship at the Tate so that I might eventually meet the right people. All I want is to make a living. I feel like I am being wronged, because my art doesn’t get the attention it deserves.”

To gain access, he was not just “Alex James”. “Gary Hume” urged the gallerist Victoria Miro to check out Russell Thoburn; “Damien Hirst” suggested Saatchi visit his studio; “Jay Jopling” recommended he exhibit at a gallery space (he subsequently got a show and sold £3,000 of work, the only financial gain thus far). To date, he does not have a gallery representing him.

A few months ago, he thought, “I could do some art off this,” — work that can be seen in his show A Fake’s Progress, a name chosen when he discovered it would coincide with the Hogarth exhibition at Tate Britain. “Like me, Hogarth satirises the politesse of the middle-class world,” he says. Inner Circle, After Hogarth’s Tavern Scene has hundreds of Bryant & May matches, ordinary ones with brown heads, standing outside a circle of colourful matchboxes from Sketch, St John, the Groucho, The Hospital, Momo and all the art-world haunts he infiltrated. Inside are colourful matches, with heads of every colour. “The brown matches represent the masses at art, fashion and photography events. If you are one of those artists on the edge, a brown match, how do you get a deal with a gallery?”

He says he does not criticise the art world, he merely — “like Warhol” — holds a mirror up to it, something he has done throughout his career. An earlier show in a small basement gallery next to Saatchi’s old St John’s Wood space revolved around

Saatchi’s power and influence. A Saatchi employee asked him “politely” to close it down. “They are so big — why are they even bothered?” He calls his blagging “social sculpting”; others may call it gate-crashing.

Alex James calls it identity theft. “He’s looting the most valuable thing everyone’s got, which is their identity — although I suppose the justice in what he’s done depends on whether what he is doing is any good or not. Imposters soon go away. Imitation is a part of the creative process. Everyone starts from that point. Bands impersonate other bands. You could say Holbein used the people he painted to make him famous.” James also doubts whether Thoburn had much success in penetrating the circle of colourful matchsticks. “He might have got in, but it is close-knit.”

Thoburn says: “It’s all about establishing your brand: Chris Ofili with his elephant dung, Damien Hirst’s dead animals and spot paintings. Mine is the blagging thing. Collectors tend to be straight people; they feed off the colour of the person as much as the art. Grayson Perry, sexually, is coming from a position that is appealing to the art world, where you need to be an outsider to be an insider.” But his beef is not with the artists. “I love the art world,” he says, with genuine passion, “because it embraces everything. Artists are great people. Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst are from similar working-class backgrounds to mine. We all struggle to adapt. But this is about the money and politics, not art. It’s like the 1980s all over again — the people who buy art nowadays would normally just buy property.”

He shows me an invitation for “Alex” and his wife to join Gilbert and George for a dinner to celebrate their Tate show: “That’ll be my last party.” His project is over, his secret is out; whether his antics have helped his career remains to be seen.

A Fake’s Progress is at the Foundry, EC2, from February 28

Mr Bigs of Britart buy into China

From The Sunday Times

February 18, 2007

Richard Brooks, Arts Editor

BRITART’S two leading art impresarios are turning east. Charles Saatchi, who made his name promoting the likes of Damien Hirst, and Frank Cohen, his Manchester rival, are to stage Britain’s first big exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art.

Cohen’s show will take place in Wolverhampton in the spring, while Saatchi’s follows in London at the end of the summer. They will help alter many preconceptions of Chinese culture.

The shows contrast with an exhibition last year at the Royal Academy and another later this year at the British Museum fea-turing artefacts from imperial China.

Contemporary China is often seen as a booming land of mass-produced consumer goods and communist repression with little notable artistic output. This image is now likely to alter.

“It’s fascinating buying from a place like China which is changing so much and so fast,” said Cohen, who now owns about 70 paintings by Chinese artists and whose exhibition opens at the Initial Access gallery next month “Change in a society often brings with it interesting art. I’m also buying from China because I want to stay ahead of the game.”

Works going on show will include two of Princess Diana by the same artist, Li Qing. Saatchi’s shows her and the Prince of Wales kissing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on their wedding day in 1981 while Cohen’s depicts her funeral cortãge in 1997.

In addition to Cohen and Saatchi, other galleries are catching on to Chinese art. Exhibitions will be staged this year by the Tate Liverpool and the Haunch of Venison in central London.

Saatchi, who made his fortune in advertising before moving into dealing art, will place his Chinese collection at his new gallery in Chelsea, west London, when it opens this summer.

He came to prominence as a Britart impresario but in recent years has sold many of his works by young British artists such as Hirst, the Chapman brothers and Marc Quinn. Now, following the lead of western businessmen who outsource production to China, Saatchi and others see the country’s art as a great untapped resource.

“We started looking at Chinese art a couple of years ago,” said Saatchi. “We were initially sniffy about it as it seemed kitschy and derivative. But, just like art everywhere, some of the artists were so strong. So we’ve been won over and have found that the best 10 or so are producing work as exciting as anything made in Europe or America.”

Both collectors have bought recent works by Feng Zhengjie and Li Songsong. “Li’s Cuban Sugar is my favourite,” said Cohen.

The largest sum Saatchi has spent on Chinese art is £800,000 on A Big Family by Zhang Xiaogang, which he purchased last October. Another work by Zhang sold at an auction at Chris-tie’s Hong Kong last November for £1.2m.

The most costly work of any contemporary Chinese artist was the £1.45m for a work by Liu Xiaodong, sold in Beijing last autumn to an overseas buyer.

The art of China

From The Times

February 15, 2007

Works by modern Chinese artists are now commanding millions in the auction rooms. But is it a bubble that might burst? examines China’s art boom

Jane Macartney

The art world gasped when a painting by the Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang sold for just short of $1 million (£511,000) at Sotheby’s last March. But that was merely the start. In October, Charles Saatchi paid £770,000 for another of his Bloodline Series of Cultural Revolution portraits and in November his 1993 Tiananmen Square went for £1.17 million at an auction in Hong Kong. That same month a Chinese restaurant entrepreneur bought a painting by the cynical realist Liu Xiaodong for £1.4 million.

That dizzying run of records has led to rumblings of a bubble.

If there is a bubble in the market for contemporary Chinese art, gallery owners, curators and collectors are not expecting it to pop just yet.

Karen Smith, a British woman, arrived in China in 1993 planning to stay a year and research a book on Chinese art. Some 14 years later she is a leading authority, working from an office a stone’s throw from the Forbidden City and co-curating The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China, which opens at the Tate Liverpool on March 30. She is of the view that, bubble or no bubble, modern Chinese art is finally being plotted on to the world map.

“Even if it does crash, everything goes in cycles, and out of that will come something new. Chinese art is not going away,” she says.

Indeed, contemporary artists are laying solid foundations. An East German-built former military components assembly plant has now become known among art cognoscenti as the 798 Factory. The collection of 400 galleries, cafés, bookshops and restaurants housed in disused industrial buildings has even received an official stamp of recognition from the Beijing city government as one of six cultural and creative centres in the capital. Avant garde and counter-culture artists who once revelled in their disdain for the authorities have found themselves almost mainstream.

Receipt of a government imprimatur is likely only to fuel demand and to support prices. Chinese buyers who may have been wary of investing in artworks by painters on the fringes of society are starting to enter a market so far dominated by international buyers. These collectors discovered the contemporary art scene mainly because of the headline-grabbing prices paid at last year’s auctions. A breed of newly rich Chinese who ten years ago were dealing in coal and then discovered property have now found modern art.

Strolling among the hangar-like grey concrete buildings of the 798 Factory are more and more young Chinese, eager for a taste of this most hip and chic of Beijing quarters. Chinese film stars rub shoulders with Shanghai designers, foreign diplomats and overseas businessmen at the latest vernissage on a weekend afternoon. The occasion was a solo show by Chang Zongxian at the Xin Dong Cheng Space for Contemporary Art. The walls were lined with portraits of fellow artists — including the small but expanding group who now command prices

in the hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Cheng Xindong, who owns the gallery, says there’s no doubt that prices, at least for a tiny group of artists, suddenly skyrocketed in 2006. “Last year was crazy,” he says. But Cheng has been collecting and curating since 1992 and feels that the very slow and steady rise in prices in the intervening years was even more of a conundrum – given the quality of the work by the very best painters – than the sudden discovery that there were some great contemporary artists in China. “These prices apply only to a very small group of star artists and their works are still not really expensive,” he says.

In 1995, a painting by Zhang Xiaogang, one of his portraits of vacant-faced families, could be bought for as little as £5,000 but now – after 11 years of work – the minimum price is £300,000.

“This is just the beginning,” says Cheng. “Before the prices were all about the same. There was no big difference. Now a huge gap has opened up between this very small group of stars and the rest.”

Among that select group is Zeng Fanzhi. His works already feature in the Saatchi collection. Zeng, like many of those involved in the Chinese contemporary art scene, voices concern at the role of auctions in pushing up prices – possibly artificially.

He says he was shocked when he sold a painting to a buyer who presented himself as a collector and almost immediately sold the piece at auction for a much higher price. “Are people buying my works for pleasure or for busi-ness? We didn’t understand at first that people were starting to speculate and not to invest. Now there’s a bit of a question mark around auctions and I try to be careful that I am selling my paintings to people who genuinely like them. Otherwise people might think we are trying to manipulate the market.”

Sotheby’s and Christie’s sold £97 million of Asian contemporary art, mostly by Chinese artists, last year, compared with £11 million the year before. Zeng says it is not the international auctions that worry him but speculation at sales in China. Some artists and gallery owners

have been suspected of sending representatives to auctions to bid up the prices.

This has some gallery owners worried. They say that as a result of the heady sums achieved in auctions, some higher-priced painters are producing works almost to a formula. Reports have even surfaced of artists employing students to paint a piece to their design. Critics worry that the more established names may be becoming increasingly unwilling to experiment because they have found a style that can guarantee them enough money to live more than comfortably in China.

Brian Wallace, owner of the Red Gate Gallery and the first foreigner to open a gallery in Beijing, in 1992, believes that most of the painters now commanding high prices will stand the test of time. “Some have painted themselves into a corner, but the hope is that they’ll realise that and step back.”

In Zeng’s studio outside Beijing, a huge, almost abstract work resembling tangled bushes against flames stands against the wall. It is a far cry from the Mask series that won him renown.

He says he can’t stay still in his work. “When I change it’s because I feel I have done everything I can in that style and I have no feeling left in me. If I don’t feel excited then I can’t press ahead and find a new way to paint.”

It is an approach that critics hope will sustain the market in case of a bubble.

Wallace believes that some air may escape but is unconcerned. “I see a good couple of years yet and this is going to give the market time to mature. When prices do settle there will be a stronger body of work in collections – both domestic and international.”

There is no denying that some younger artists are trying to leap on the bandwag-on, excited by the 2006 price explosion and eager for a piece of the action.

One of the few who is convinced that a bubble is already in the making is Huang Rui, founder of the Dashanzi International Art Festival, which drew as many as 160,000 people in its fourth year in 2006. One of the first members of that artist community, Huang occupies an austere space at 798 with his paintings on the wall and vase of lilac roses at the centre of a huge wooden table.

He is a founder of “The Stars” – the first independently creative artists to emerge in China after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Serving fragrant tea out of exquisite porcelain cups little bigger than thimbles, he remains an unafraid member of China’s counter-culture.

“Artists are just creating for the bubble and this affects their creative ability. They will lose confidence and this will affect their ability to paint. Many painters now face this crisis. The market is too commercialised.”

He is anxious lest these works are picked up by buyers who lack experience. It may be at this level that the “China factor” will come into play.

Are collectors buying because of the quality of the work or because of the excitement surrounding all things Chinese?

The mystique surrounding China cannot be denied. “In the past six months people do seem to have struggled at spotting talent. There’s a blurring of the senses, as if entering a dark room from sunlight. It takes time for the eyes to adjust.”

Wallace, speaking in his gallery housed in an ancient city gate, says he is thrilled by the amount of new talent, but also notes that some artists have tried to cash in. “This is where the market has to respond by saying we want good art, not just Chinese art.”

£6m sale for an artist who actually paints

From The Times

February 9, 2007

Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent

A Scottish painter has become one of world’s most successful living artists after one of his works was sold for nearly £6 million at Sotheby’s.

Peter Doig’s White Canoe, a monumental painting, changed hands for £5.73 million - five times its estimate - on Wednesday night. Sotheby’s described it as a phenomenal achievement, a record for a living European artist. The winning bidder remained anonymous.

The Edinburgh-born painter has become more expensive than British heavyweights such as David Hockney and Lucian Freud whose record is £4.15 million for Red-haired Man on a Chair. Hockney’s stands at £2.92 million for The Splash. Only the American artist Jasper Johns is thought to have earned more from a single sale.

Doig’s work was always expected to do well, because he is a sought-after artist, but there were murmurs of disbelief when bidding reached £3.2 million. His previous record was £1.12 million and this was a work he completed just after leaving Chelsea School of Art in the early 1990s.

Works by other big names, including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, also went under the hammer during the sale, which raised a total of £45.76 million.

Seven works by Warhol fetched a total of £5.72 million. They included Self-Portrait (Fright Wig), for £1.47 million, and Hammer and Sickle, which fetched £1.53 million.

Doig, 47, was one of 11 contemporary artists whose records were broken that evening. Doig moved from Edinburgh to the Caribbean and Canada as a schoolboy before returning to Britain to study art. He is best known for his landscapes based on childhood scenes, and has now based himself in Trinidad and Tobago. One of his last major sales was in June last year, when his canvas Iron Hill was auctioned for a record then of £1.12 million. It followed an exhibition of his work by Charles Saatchi.

Francis Outred, Sotheby’s senior director, said that Doig was reaping rewards for sticking with painting when it went out of fashion in the 1990s. “He has been the flag bearer for painting,” he said.

Out on his own

- Won Whitechapel Artists Award in 1990; first museum presentation soon followed
- Won John Moores Foundation Prize in 1993 and was nominated for Turner Prize in 1994
- Large-scale landscapes and pastoral themes made him the odd one out in 1990s London dominated by Young British Artists 32 works in the Tate, including Ski Jacket, painting which shows influence of Canadian landscape
- Acid colours and a loose technique suggest comparisons with PostImpressionists

Source: Saatchi Gallery/Tate

Peter Doig ‘Canoe’ Painting Gets $10 Million

By BLOOMBERG NEWS

Published: February 8, 2007

LONDON — A painting by the Scottish-born artist Peter Doig fetched $10 million on Wednesday at an auction at Sotheby’s, breaking the artist’s record and underlining the enduring market influence of the work’s latest owner, the collector Charles Saatchi.

The work, “White Canoe” a 1991 canvas of a boat on a lake that mirrors trees, went to an unidentified telephone bidder. (The price does not include the commission.) The previous record for a Doig painting was his “Iron Hill,” which sold for $2.1 million in June at Sotheby’s.

The $10 million sale price far exceeded the auction house’s estimate for the painting. Sotheby’s had predicted that it could go for as much as $2.4 million.

The auction house is said to have bought “White Canoe” and six other Doig paintings from Sir Charles last year for about $11 million.

Wednesday’s sale was part of a hectic auction week here with projected total sales of as much as $810 million. Several major collectors, including Sir Charles and David Geffen, are selling works to capitalize on soaring prices.

Sir Charles, founder of an advertising agency and a prominent art trend-spotter, has been focusing on Chinese and American contemporary art lately.

Taiwan's museum of treasures

By Caroline Gluck
BBC News, Taipei

Taiwan's National Palace Museum - which boasts some of the most important treasures collected by China's ancient emperors - reopens on Thursday after a three year, $21m renovation designed to make its buildings more relevant and user-friendly.

There are more public areas, larger gallery spaces displaying items that are now chronologically arranged, a dramatic light-filled lobby, several new restaurants and a larger gift shop as well as digital displays.

The museum's collection has always been world class, but the renovations now place the museum itself on a world class footing.

"The Chinese collections housed at the National Palace Museum are unrivalled," according to director Lin Mun-lee, who said one of her top priorities was to make a connection between the museum and people.

"But the museum not only has a legacy, it also has a boundless future. Its future will definitely be closely tied to Taiwan and its people," she said.

Sensitive relations

The museum's collection traces its roots to 1933, as Japan prepared to invade China.

China's Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek decided to move thousands of treasures originally kept inside Beijing's Forbidden City. They were carefully packed up and secretly transported across China to protect them.

And it was on Chiang's orders that more than 3,000 crates of treasures were eventually shipped to Taiwan, where the Nationalists fled to in the final months of the Chinese civil war in 1948 and 1949.

That historical legacy means some of the museum's changes have also proved controversial.

China's state-run media has criticised plans approved by Taiwan's cabinet to remove references to the Chinese provenance of artefacts in the museum's governing charter.

China says it is part of attempts by Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian's independence-leaning government to try to deny the island's historical roots to the mainland.

Lin Mun-lee flatly denied that claim, saying the 20-year-old charter needed an overhaul and historical references should play no part of its organisational structure.

She also denied suggestions that the museum was planning to remove labels explaining that many exhibits originally came from Beijing's Forbidden City, later renamed the Palace Museum.

The controversies show just how sensitive relations between the two rivals remain - even when it comes to art.

Even so, the museum in the Taiwanese capital, Taipei, is a powerful magnet for Chinese tourists.

Those numbers are likely to surge later this year with an expected agreement on relaxing restrictions on visits by mainland tourists.

Rare view

The Taipei museum contains more than 650,000 objects - a collection so vast that less than 1% can be viewed at any one time.

But it carefully guards its treasures.

Overseas loans are rare since the museum insists any host country must first pass immunity from judicial seizure laws - to prevent China from taking legal action to reclaim any of the works.

While visitors can only see a fraction of the treasures, the rest is kept in temperature controlled basement vaults.

But about a thousand more crates are kept in another area - off limits to all but a handful of museum staff - in one of two tunnels carved into the mountainside behind the museum, designed to protect the treasures if China ever attacked Taiwan.

We entered through three elaborately sealed and locked doors, accompanied by two security guards and five museum staff. On either side were black steel crates, all numbered and stacked on top of each other. One group of boxes were the original wooden crates used to ship the treasures from China.

Kao Ren-chun, now 84, helped transport the artefacts from China to Taiwan to prevent them falling into the hands of the communists.

"Our mission was to transport these 5,000-year-old Chinese relics and to safeguard them. We could not allow any loss or damage to the pieces. It was a very important job," he said.

"Nobody thought about their own safety. There was just one goal and that was to move these objects which were so important for Chinese culture, and the world's."

Despite the drama of that time, Mr Kao did not hesitate when asked what he thought about calls by Beijing to have the artworks returned.

"You can put these pieces anywhere. The most important thing is that they can get shown to the public - and can spread this culture, to share it with the rest of the world, and let people know about Chinese arts and culture," he said.

A Chinese tourist visiting the museum gave almost exactly the same answer.

Gao Yonglin, from Henan province, said he was happy to see the treasures so well preserved.

"My view is different from the conservative attitude of people born in the 1940s and 1950s who still want these objects to be returned to China," he said.

"No matter where these things are kept, they are still promoting Chinese culture."

Young British Artists eclipsed by older generation

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Thursday, 1 February 2007

For the past decade or so it has been the Young British Artists who have grabbed the headlines, with artists such as Damien Hirst commanding £1m or more for their most ambitious works.

But there are now signs that older generations of major British painters and sculptors are being rediscovered at the auction houses by the new band of collectors in the UK.

Artists such as Bridget Riley, Anish Kapoor and Peter Doig have all broken the £1m barrier in the past year, to achieve prices that were at least double their pre-sale estimates.

And Cheyenne Westphal, the chairman of contemporary art for Sotheby's in Europe, is predicting that at the age of 75, the reclusive Frank Auerbach, who escaped Nazi Germany for Britain as a child, will be the next big thing. "There has been an unbelievable rise upwards in British painting over the last couple of years," she said.

"Overall the return to figurative work and to painting in the last five years makes you re-evaluate the older generation. I think Auerbach is poised to make the next big leap - if not this sale, it will happen."

Although high prices for the late Francis Bacon (record £7.9m set 2006) and for Lucian Freud (record £4.1m set 2005) have become a feature of the salerooms in recent years, many other artists have remained comparative bargains until now.

Untitled (Diagonal Curve) (1966), an early Pop Art masterpiece by Riley, 75, was estimated to make up to £400,000 at Sotheby's London last summer. It went for £1.18m .

Doig, 47, enjoyed his first million-pound painting when Iron Hill went for £1.128m in the same sales last June, two or three times more than estimated.

Another Doig, White Canoe, which was once owned by Charles Saatchi, is being sold in next Wednesday's contemporary art sale with an estimate of up to £1.2m.

Ms Westphal said: "He is defining a generation not just of British painters but of painters. You can't really collect figurative painting from the 1990s and not see Doig as probably the leading artist."

Although Auerbach is not yet in the seven-figure league, his painting, After Mornington Crescent II (1993), made £456,000 last year against an estimate of £250-350,000 and another work is expected to make up to £700,000 at next week's auction.

The Camden Theatre in the Rain was one of the stars of the Royal Academy exhibition, British Art in the 20th Century, and illustrated the poster for Auerbach's 1978 retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London. It has been described as a masterpiece of his most artistically fertile and commercially sought-after period in the 1970s.

Talk of Auerbach's big leap was dismissed by his dealer. Geoffrey Parton, of Marlborough Fine Art, said: "He's a major artist who has been steadily building his reputation for 50 years. He has always done very well."

But Ms Westphal was adamant that the greater number of collectors in Britain was boosting interest.

Other factors can help. Anish Kapoor's profile in America was boosted by the installation last year of Sky Mirror, a huge mirror, on Fifth Avenue in New York, and Cloud Gate, a sculpture installed in Chicago's Millennium Park in 2004.Kapoor, 52, broke the million-pound barrier last November at Sotheby's New York with Untitled (1999), a piece in carved alabaster, which went for $2.256m (£1.186m).