An Auction for the History Books

If you have followed the news from Denmark lately, you might have heard about the 600-year-old Chinese porcelain dish with a dragon motif, which was sold to a Chinese buyer for DKK 35.5 million. The bidding round was nerve-wracking in the saleroom as Jesper Bruun Rasmussen auctioned off the rare dragon dish that comes from the collection of the Swedish city architect Salomon Sörensen. The result was the highest hammer price we have ever achieved in the history of our auction house.

In total, we achieved seven hammer prices above the million at this auction, and among them was a hammer price of DKK 2.8 million for the Copenhagen painter Paul Fischer's festive motif from the Strøget shopping street, where the Queen’s Royal Guard are seen in red uniforms on the occasion of King Christian X's birthday. From a summer night on Bornholm, we presented Oluf Høst's "Sankt Hans Nat" from 1953, which with expressive power depicts the condensed atmosphere this special evening holds for Danes with the glowing flames against the blue coolness of the night sky. The work itself also soared with a hammer price of DKK 1.55 million – an auction record for this eminent Bornholm painter.

Several Surprising Hammer Prices

Another fine hammer price of DKK 850,000 was achieved by Laurits Andersen Ring's work "Spring and the Old Man" from 1926, while two torn brass eggs entitled "Concetto spaziale, Natura" from 1967 by the Argentine-Italian icon Lucio Fontana were sold for a hammer price of DKK 800,000. Contemporary art also enjoyed a good deal of success at the auction, where, among other lots, Jeppe Hein's balloons "Four Wishes for you" were sent off with a hammer price of DKK 420,000. Among the design classics, a pair of Grete Jalk's original shell chairs ended up with the hammer price of DKK 380,000.