Splashing out: Hockney painting on sale for £9m at Art Basel

‘There might be another life after death,” said David Hockney in an interview in 2020. It was certainly true of his paintings at Art Basel last week, where work by the artist, who died earlier this month at the age of 88, experienced a surge in demand.

Clare McAndrew, the cultural economist behind the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report, said she had been tracking a “supply grab” of Hockney’s paintings in the days after his death. “Someone as iconic as Hockney would always have had a really strong market anyway, but there is a boost here,” she said.

Demand for Hockney’s work from collectors had already risen by more than 1,200% in the 48 hours after his death, according to the private sales platform MyArtBroker, and in Basel buyers were being given one of the first chances since the artist’s death to acquire his works in person.

The most expensive of his paintings up for sale was Delphiniums on My Garden Table, July 2025, on offer for $12m (£9m) at Annely Juda. David Juda, the gallery owner and a long-term friend of Hockney, said the painting was “close to his heart” and showed a bunch of flowers Hockney had received for his last birthday. Juda was also selling two of Hockney’s drawings from a set design he had made for a Royal Court theatre production that, he said, would only interest a “serious collector”. He was happy to be displaying “his early craft, because it’s important; not everyone can appreciate it”.

At Richard Gray, gallerists clinked champagne flutes after Hockney’s Studio Interior #2 from 2014 sold for $8.5m. Pace, the mega-gallery which has made headlines recently for cutting a third of its artist roster and a fifth of its staff, had chosen to “hold back” their Hockney, an iPad painting, by placing it in the fair’s newly launched Basel Exclusive category. This meant dealers and collectors, who usually hear about sales in advance, only found out about the work when they cast eyes on it on the first day of the fair. “It added a nice bit of surprise,” said Rebecca Riegelhaupt, Pace’s communications director. Marc Glimcher, the gallery’s chief executive, said selling Hockney’s work after his death was “an incredible honour”.

For the gallerists at the fair, Pace’s downsizing felt indicative of wider art market stagnation. Over the past two decades, fairs such as Art Basel have gone global, expanding to Paris, Miami Beach and Qatar. But according to Marc Spiegler, the former global director of Art Basel, “the art-selling business itself didn’t keep up with the hype”. McAndrew said that even as the number of artists and galleries increases, “the new collectors just aren’t there to keep up”. Her report shows that this year “the market has just stopped growing”.

In a difficult financial environment, the costs associated with Art Basel have become insurmountably high for smaller galleries. Booths can cost up to $120,000, not including the price of transporting artwork, which has been inflated by global conflicts. Freddie Powell, who runs Ginny on Frederick in east London, had secured one of the cheapest booths. “Still, I don’t understand how anyone can afford it downstairs,” he said. It’s insane.” David Juda, who has been to every Art Basel since it began in 1970, said the price for galleries to attend the fair had become “completely absurd”. He mourned the old days when “everything used to be hung badly, but it was incredible art. Now, everything is hung well, but it’s a bit meh.”

Photograph courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art, London © David Hockney