Banksy’s Keep Ou T, offered at auction for the first time, sold for £1,612,500 at Phillips in London. The price, including fees, came on the evening of Thursday 15 October, the second night of the London sales of Frieze week, inside an estimate of £1.2 million to £1.8 million. The work is a stencilled rat on the shutters of an arch, holding up the letter T it has taken from the words KEEP OU, and it was shown at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in the year it was made. Across Mayfair, the same evening, Sotheby’s sold a Willem de Kooning for £9.8 million, the top price of the night.
£1,612,500 for a rat, a padlock and the letter T
The work dates from 2019. Phillips describes an arch “purportedly salvaged from Heathrow Airport”, with a stencilled rat across its shutters that breaks open a padlock and brandishes the letter T from the phrase KEEP OU. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition that year, and Phillips presented the sale as its auction debut. Lot 4 of the evening, it sold within its estimate, according to the results published by Phillips. In dollars, Artnet put it at about $2.1 million.
Richter’s Mathis leads Phillips at £5.8 million
The top lot at Phillips was Gerhard Richter’s Mathis, of 1983, which sold for £5,839,000 against an estimate of £6 million to £8 million. Phillips described it as “the first and most structurally complex of a subset of four abstract canvases (Abstrakte Bilder) from 1983”. David Hockney’s Red and Black Fruit made £993,300, and three lots made £645,000 each: Joseph Yaeger’s Once, always, Salvador Dalí’s El torrent de la Jorneta and Hockney’s Red Leather Chair. The Yaeger set an auction record for the artist, according to Artnet and HENI, as did Eva Helene Pade’s Yellow Nights at £167,700. All 20 lots offered were sold. The total was about £14.8 million. Three works by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood had been withdrawn before the sale, bought for public collections in Plymouth and Exeter, Artnet reported. “Works that are fresh, from private collections and from known collections, continue to drive interest,” Olivia Thornton, Phillips’ deputy chairwoman and head of Modern and Contemporary Art in Europe, told Artnet.
Sotheby’s: a de Kooning at £9.8 million
At Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction, Willem de Kooning’s Untitled, of 1977, sold for £9.8 million with fees, or $12.9 million, on a hammer of £8.2 million against an estimate of £8 million to £12 million, according to ARTnews and Artnet. Artnet called it “the most ever paid for the artist’s work at an European auction”. Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild, of 1992, made £6.7 million. A late Mark Rothko on paper, Untitled, of 1969, made £3.8 million, and David Hockney’s Henry Reading, of 1985, about $3.7 million. The sale took about £46 million, $61 million, with 28 of the 34 lots offered sold.
“The combined results tonight, £219 million, and prices achieved for Kandinsky, Mondrian and Bacon, further reinforce London’s position as a key international market for museum-quality masterpieces.” Keith Gill, Vice-Chairman, 20th/21st Century Art, Christie’s
Christie’s official figures, and about £288 million in two nights
Christie’s has now published its own results for Wednesday 14 October, in a release reprinted by ArtDaily, and they confirm the figures in our report on the Mondrian: £218,603,400 for its two evening sales, with Piet Mondrian’s Composition III at £25,235,000 and Wassily Kandinsky’s Das bunte Leben at £31,560,000. The Mondrian’s hammer price was £21.5 million, The Art Newspaper reported. Add Sotheby’s two evening sales and Phillips, and the London evening auctions of Frieze week reached about £288 million in two nights, by luxury.it’s count, without Bonhams, which held its own evening sale on Thursday.
De Kooning in Amsterdam, and the sales still to come
For de Kooning, the place to go this autumn is Amsterdam. The Rijksmuseum shows Willem de Kooning at work, with more than 120 pieces, from 9 October 2026 to 17 January 2027. The painter, who lived from 1904 to 1997, was born and raised in Rotterdam. In London, the sales go on. Phillips holds its Modern & Contemporary Art day sale on Saturday 17 October at 1pm, and Christie’s Modern British evening sale follows on 21 October, led by Barbara Hepworth’s Eos.
The Luxury.it perspective
Banksy is the name that travels. Keep Ou T also had what the market rewards: a work never offered before, a clear image and a public exhibition behind it. Its price, inside the estimate, fits the pattern of the week. “Fresh” was the word Phillips’ Olivia Thornton chose, and the two pieces we followed most closely, the Mondrian at Christie’s and the Banksy at Phillips, were both at auction for the first time. For collectors, Frieze week in London has shown its weight again, with about £288 million in two evenings. For everyone else, the de Kooning show at the Rijksmuseum runs until 17 January.
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Art Basel Paris and Frieze London 2026 · The 90s at Tate Britain · Renoir and Love at the National Gallery · Van Gogh at Sotheby’s
