Overview
- Freeman’s sold Frank Gehry’s Icehenge for $243,200 last week, a price more than ten times its $20,000 high estimate and a new auction record for one of his design objects.
- Icehenge is a 16-piece, seven-ton composition of rough-cut, emerald-tinted glass blocks whose irregular, stacked arrangement creates dramatic internal bubbles and light refractions.
- Gehry created the piece during a renovation of Chicago’s Inland Steel Building after acquiring a stake in the property, and the work functioned as the building’s sculptural reception desk installed by 2012.
- Freeman’s said the unnamed buyer is committed to keeping Icehenge publicly accessible and is considering a temporary loan to a museum, a step that would help address the practical challenges of moving and displaying such a large, site-specific object.
- The sale surpassed the previous Gehry design-object record of a Fish Lamp and highlights growing collector and institutional interest in museum-scale design while Gehry’s overall auction high remains the Winton Guest House at $905,000 in 2015.