Phillips’s 2023 Auction Sales Down 15 Percent from 2022

Phillips made $840.7 million in auction sales in the last year, the auction house told ARTnews—a figure that marks a 15 percent decrease from the previous year’s total of just over $1 billion.

The Russian-owned company is the smallest of the three major houses, with headquarters in New York, London, and Hong Kong. In 2023, it spent its resources reconfiguring its key locations, announcing that it had added specialists in Asia in December. In July, Phillips consolidated its operations in Los Angeles after eliminating two regional positions on the West Coast.

In 2023, the top five works sold by Phillips, by artists such as Gerhard Richter and Fernand Léger, brought in a cumulative $87.6 million. That’s a 50 percent drop from the $173 million generated from the house’s top five works in 2022, when two pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Yves Klein alone brought in $126 million.

A Phillips representative declined to provide additional comment regarding its 2023 results. The house also did not provide figures for its private sales totals.

In previous years, Phillips has announced figures for its private sales. In 2022, the house’s private sales total surpassed the one for 2022, with an estimated $250 million brought in as the house turned its focus on selling exhibitions of modern art. That was 20 percent more than the $208.2 million the boutique house brought in through private sales in 2021.

One of Phillips’s main competitors, Christie’s, also both saw lower sales totals in 2023 than it did in 2022. Christie’s reported a 30 percent decline in sales from auctions in mid-December, going from $7.2 billion in 2022 to just over $5 billion in 2023. Sotheby’s, another Phillips competitor, has not yet announced its sales figures for 2023.

According to a recent report by ArtTactic, a data company based in London, auction sales in 2023 were down $2.3 billion from 2022’s figures.