Despite signs that sales in the global art market have slowed, Vancouver art auctioneers say they are doing well.
Annual global art market sales declined by 12 per cent last year to an estimated US$57.5 billion, according to the 2025 Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report by Arts Economics.
“This marked the second year of slowing sales, with the main drag on growth being the high end of the market,” the report said.
Those high-end sales, it said, thinned out significantly in 2023 and 2024, creating lower aggregate values despite stronger sales in some lower-priced segments.
The report added that despite the drop in the value of total sales, the number of transactions increased by three per cent, to 40.5 million in 2024.
Vancouver-based Heffel Fine Art Auction House CEO David Heffel told BIV that looking at the total sales value for art-auction transactions can be misleading because that metric largely depends on which art pieces go up for sale.
“The drop in the sales volume, historically, isn’t necessarily a drop in the buyer appetite or the collector’s appetite to buy,” he said. “It’s just that there’s a drying up of great paintings coming to the market.”
A better metric to gauge success, he said, is the percentage of items that successfully sell at auction.
Heffel’s gallery has two major live auctions each year, in May and in November. Buyers can also bid remotely in those live auctions.
Otherwise, Heffel holds smaller monthly auctions that are online-only. Private sales outside of the auctions is its third main source of revenue.
Heffel’s spring auction saw 89 per cent of the items that were offered for sale successfully sell, while its November 2024 auction found buyers for 96 per cent of items that were offered for sale, he said.
Heffel added that great works of art bought decades ago by people who were in the early baby-boom generation have been coming to market in the past few years.
“I see that not only continuing, but increasing,” he said.
Recent auctions have seen steady sales that Heffel called “strong.”
Its spring auction generated $22,339,625 in total sales and reached record $301,887 per lot, he said.
While strong, that was not as good as the auction one year earlier.
Total sales in the spring auction were down by more than $650,375, or about 2.8 per cent compared with the $22,990,000 that transacted in the May 2024 auction.
Last fall’s auction generated $23,602,374 in total sales, which was also down year-over-year.
Those sales were down by a little more than two per cent from Heffel’s fall 2023 auction. The average lot’s selling price in that November 2024 auction was $219,108, according to Heffel’s data.
The art seller had a banner 2024, however.
When all auction sales are tallied for the year, including the smaller monthly ones, Heffel generated $62,954,450 last year, the company said. That was the art gallery’s highest tally since 2015’s $68,508,780 in auction sales, according to Heffel data. Those amounts do not include private sales, which often have non-disclosure agreements, he said.
Heffel’s gallery’s biggest-ever sale for an auction item was the $11.21 million that it achieved selling Lawren Harris’ Mountain Forms in November 2016. The size of that sale price was helped by comedian Steve Martin, who co-curated a Lawren Harris exhibition at multiple galleries across North America earlier that year, Heffel said.
The buy-Canadian sentiment among consumers that has been fueled by tariff threats and actions by U.S. President Donald Trump also helped Heffel’s spring auction be a success, he added.
“Our spring sale was an all-Canadian offering with many works by our prized Canadian Group of Seven and their contemporaries, such as Tom Thomson,” he said, adding that this was the first time in many years that has held an art auction without any foreign artists’ work.
In the past, his auctions have included works by foreign artists, such as Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
“The impact of the tariff chatter seemed to provide a bit of a stimulus, by the way it amplified Canadian nationalism,” he said.
Heffel is the largest art auctioneer in Canada, and it is a second-generation business founded in 1978 by Heffel’s father, Kenneth G. Heffel.
He said his gallery has sold more than $1 billion worth of art since inception.
Executives at smaller art auction houses in Vancouver say they are also doing well.
“Overall, we are finding the market is still quite strong,” Maynards Fine Art & Antiques vice-president Neil McAllister told BIV.
“Certain areas seem to be cooling down, such as the Asian market and the antique furniture market, but others are still doing well.”
He said his company has been dealing in Northwest Coast art for years but has “seen the market explode” for that work in the past year.
“While there is certainly a large supply coming onto the market there is also a strong appetite for it, especially good pieces by recognizable artists,” McAllister said.
One recent Maynards sale was for Bill Reid’s 22-karat gold sculpture Raven and the First Men. It sold for $110,000, McAllister said.
