The 14th London edition of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair closed at Somerset House on 18 October, and it looked noticeably different from previous years. Founded by Touria El Glaoui in 2013, the fair has long championed contemporary artists from Africa and its diaspora. This year it shifted its gaze to an earlier generation, anchoring the programming around West Wind, an exhibition of mid-century modernists curated by South African-Portuguese art historian Nancy Dantas.
The fair also arrived smaller. London drew 42 exhibitors, down from more than 60 in 2024. The Marrakech edition contracted too, from 30 galleries to 22 this past February. That tighter footprint reflects a few turbulent years in the broader market.
Auction sales of modern and contemporary African art peaked at $87.2 million in 2022, slipped to $79.8 million in 2023, then fell 45 percent to $43.9 million in 2024. That drop was steeper than the 25 percent decline in global public auction sales that same year. Last year brought some relief: African art sales climbed 42.6 percent to $62.8 million, outpacing global auction growth of 11.1 percent, and the number of lots sold hit its highest point since 2016.
But Giles Peppiatt, who launched Bonhams' Modern and Contemporary African Art department back in 2006, says those headline numbers mask two very different stories. The contemporary segment, built largely on young figurative painters whose prices surged after the pandemic, went through what he calls "a rather brutal correction." Artists selling for hundreds of thousands in 2022 and 2023 are now fetching roughly half that. The modern market, covering artists active between about 1945 and 1990, is a different conversation entirely. "The modern market is very strong," Peppiatt says. "I'd say it's as strong now as it's ever been."
The reason comes down to supply. Living artists keep producing work. Modern artists left a finite body behind, much of it locked inside private collections for decades. Peppiatt uses Nigerian modernist Yusuf Grillo as the example: a decent Grillo, he notes, has not come up at auction in five years. When a work finally surfaces, collectors know they may not get another shot.
Originally published by African Business.