$10,478, for a collage of ashes and lead on digital photographs, from an edition of 150Kiefer’s work first cracked the $1 million watermark at auction in 2001, and since then 48 of his works have sold in excess of that benchmark. Kiefer’s total sales peaked at $22.5 million in 2016, the same year the greatest number of lots to date were offered to market, and when his average price also topped out at $562,496.
There is also a robust market for his works on paper, which regularly sell at auction for into the six figures. As with the paintings, demand is strongest for earlier examples, but again many of these are in museums such as the Met in New York and the Albertina in Vienna.Kiefer’s already illiquid secondary market was dealt a heavy blow by the pandemic, with total sales dropping 70.2 percent since 2019, to $4 million, and nary a work breaking the $1 million threshold.
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