Simone Leigh's raffia sculpture heads to auction

How much will a sculpture of stoneware and raffia fetch? Sotheby's puts the estimate for Simone Leigh's Runaway Bay at 2,500,000 to 3,500,000 US dollars. The sculpture is lot 119 in The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction in New York.

The live auction begins at 12:00 AM Greenwich Mean Time on 17 November, the lot page says. The figures are a forecast, since the sale has not yet taken place. The piece measures 96 by 66 by 66 inches, or 243.8 by 167.6 by 167.6 centimetres. Leigh made it in 2020 from stoneware, raffia and a steel armature.

What the lot page tells you

The sale lists the work as Property from an Important Private Collection, New York. Its provenance (the record of who has owned a work) starts with Hauser & Wirth in New York. The present owner bought it from the gallery in 2021.

The page carries no lot essay. A condition report is available only after you log in. Those gaps are worth knowing before you plan a bid, because the page gives little beyond the catalogue details.

I have measured my sitting room, and Runaway Bay would not fit.

The context

Leigh was born in 1967 in Chicago and lives in New York. La Biennale di Venezia lists her methods as lost-wax casting and salt-firing. She works with premodern and contemporary sculptural techniques, the page says. The Biennale page gives her birth year and home city in its short biography.

Her works also use cowrie shells, plantains, raffia and tobacco leaves. The Biennale page describes Brick House, a bronze bust of a Black woman whose skirt resembles a clay house. It was shown at the High Line in New York in 2019 and belongs to her Anatomy of Architecture series.

In April 2022 the Venice Biennale gave Leigh the Golden Lion for the Best Participant in The Milk of Dreams, its international exhibition. The jury praised a "rigorously researched, virtuosically realized, and powerfully persuasive monumental sculptural opening" to the Arsenale. The jury text does not mention Runaway Bay.

If you follow the sale, the figures to watch are the estimate and the final price.

What do you think?