Sotheby's closed its African art department. One painting made more than its best year ever

In April 2025, Sotheby's dissolved the dedicated Modern and Contemporary African Art department it had run since 2016. A month earlier, a single painting by Lisa Brice sold for £5.4 million in the house's general evening auction. That one lot outsold the department's entire best year.

What's known

The department's best-ever total, across nine years, was £4 million from a single sale in October 2019. Sotheby's folded African work back into its general contemporary and modern auctions rather than keep running it as its own line. Hannah O'Leary, who built and led the department from its 2016 launch, argued this was less a retreat than "a natural progression in a market that has come of age," a market where its strongest names no longer need a separate room to draw serious money.

Zoom out from Sotheby's and the picture gets rougher before it gets better. The wider Modern and contemporary African art auction segment fell 45% in 2024, to USD 43.9 million, according to ArtTactic data reported by The Art Newspaper. That's a hard year by any measure, and it landed at the same moment Sotheby's was making its call.

Bonhams took the opposite bet. It's now the only major auction house still running a standalone African art sale, Christie's has never had one, and its March 2025 sale reportedly cleared 97% by value. Its next sale is set for 19 March 2026 in London, led by works by William Kentridge, Irma Stern, Brice again, Ben Enwonwu, and Uzo Egonu. One house's format bet doesn't settle the argument either way, but it's a live counter-example to "the department era is over."

Set this against the market as a whole. The 2025 global art market reached USD 59.6 billion, up 4% year over year, according to the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2026. The US, UK and China alone account for 76% of that figure. Africa doesn't get its own line in the report at all. That absence is itself worth noting: a market this size, with this much attention on its top three geographies, still has no standard place to look for an African figure.

Where Okasen data fits

Every artist named above, Brice, Kentridge, Stern, Enwonwu, is verified tier on Okasen, the same segment behind OKN Verified 100's 39.44% year-over-year move in the vintage published this September. That's not proof the department closure and the index move are connected. It's worth naming anyway: the names at the center of this story are the same names driving the one part of Okasen's own data that had the strongest year.

What it means

Read the closure as a sorting, not a verdict. The artists Sotheby's built its department around are, by its own numbers, worth more inside a general sale than they ever were inside a dedicated one. That's a case for integration, not decline. Bonhams' bet says the dedicated format still has a job to do, particularly for names below the very top, where a specialist sale can build the context and expertise a general auction doesn't bother with.

What isn't settled: whether 2024's 45% drop was a correction after a speculative run-up in younger artists, a one-year wobble, or the start of something longer. Figures describing a fuller recovery through 2025, and the scale of the market's growth since 2016, currently trace to a single publication and could not be independently confirmed in this piece. Treat them as a claim worth watching, not a fact to build on yet.