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In mid-March, just before Sotheby’s modern and contemporary evening sale in London, the house’s co-heads of UK private sales, James Francis Fox and David Rothschild , ushered me into a stately backroom for a look at its invitation-only selling exhibition, “The Apartment.” Around $40 million worth of art hung on the walls, including works by David Hockney, George Condo, Gerhard Richter, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, along with designer furniture by Rose Uniacke—also for sale—to complete the in-home tableau.
As Fox and Rothschild told me, around half of the 12 works had already sold, with only two days to go. On one wall, there was conspicuous patch of white paint where a Warhol dollar sign had been removed by its new owner. Two hundred of Sotheby’s top collectors were sent an invitation to the show that consisted of a key in a box.
“We wanted to create a buzz,” Rothschild, who has since been promoted to global lead of private selling exhibitions, said. “We wanted to get big collectors to come and see the works in person, to imagine what they might look like in their homes.”
The exhibition was just the latest invitation-only private sale hosted by Sotheby’s; competitor Christie’s has been holding its own two in recent years, too. Fox, who has since left Sotheby’s, said that private sales are “flourishing” at the house, and that it sees such events as “a new way to engage collectors.”
In 2020, Sotheby’s announced that it generated a record $1.5 billion in private sales. While that intake was no doubt boosted by pandemic closures, the house said it has banked between $1.1 billion and $1.3 billion privately each year since, accounting for roughly a quarter of the house’s total annual sales.
Rothschild has been increasingly central to that category. Since moving from New York to London in 2024, he has curated four selling shows in London, including the first edition of “The Apartment” sale in 2025—which Rothschild described as “a very successful financial venture”—as well its follow-up this March, roughly worth a combined $340 million. The other two were open to the public. Sotheby’s has other private exhibitions in the pipeline later this year, including one in its new gallery in Zurich to coincide with Art Basel in June and another in Paris in October. The latter “will be magnificent,” Rothschild said.
Christie’s is also increasingly reliant on these stealthy transactions. According to the house, its three most expensive paintings sold in 2025 were sold privately. While Christie’s refused to disclose the details of the deals, a spokesperson said that all three sales outpaced its top auction sale last year, Mark Rothko’s 1958 painting, No. 31 (Yellow Stripe), which went for $62.1 million in New York. Christie’s traded $1.5 billion in art privately in 2025, also accounting for just under a quarter of its global sales. Seventeen of those works went for north of $15 million, up from 13 works in 2024. Fifty percent of the house’s private sales buyers were new to the channel, the house said.
Adrian Meyer, Christie’s global head of private sales, outlined one idea for the increasing popularity of the sales channel.
“This growth is linked to increasing global uncertainty and general market volatility,” he told ARTnews. “In that context, private sales offer a particularly suitable selling environment because they provide reassurance to clients. When you sell privately, you know what you’re going to get. By contrast, at auction, the final price is uncertain. Security and confidentiality are key elements of the private sales model.”
Rothschild similarly concluded that “in periods of uncertainty… sellers value the ability to avoid conservative public estimates and the binary nature of auction outcomes.” He added, “Discretion is important, but pricing security is the primary motivator.”
Raging conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, a US-led trade war, and worries about a global recession have taken their toll on the art market, though 2025 saw modest growth, thanks to several trophy sales last November. But if the world was set right tomorrow, would private sales wane as an important channel?
Meyer was not so sure. “We have deep knowledge of who the active buyers are and what they’re looking for, we can connect them with sellers organically.” Rothschild echoed Meyer’s sentiments.
Phillips, too, has seen private sales surge, with a 66 percent increase last year, and a total that has doubled since 2020. However, the house doesn’t host invitation-only selling exhibitions or closed auctions; all of its shows are open to the public.
Miety Heiden, the house’s chairman of private sales, told me that the post-pandemic art market, distinguished by “a more thoughtful, measured approach to collecting,” has been “very positive for private sales.”
“It provides an alternative environment to auction. Collectors and sellers alike value discretion, flexibility, and certainty, and that’s exactly where private sales excel,” she said. “They allow us to meet the market where it is, in a tailored and efficient way.”
As Artnetpointed out in its recent Intelligence Report, Christie’s secretive, invite-only, single-lot private auctions have, ironically, been well-covered in past years by its columnist Kenny Schachter and the Canvas’s Jeremy Hodgkin. These sales reportedly include Mark Rothko’s 1951 painting No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red)for $195 million and Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting The Zouave for about $200 million.
Meanwhile, innovative new platforms like Fair Warning are also hosting their own exclusive, single-lot sales. It sold a Warhol portrait of Brigitte Bardot for $16.7 million last year, perhaps inspiring Sotheby’s to include another portrait of the late actress by Warhol, estimated at $14 million–$18 million in its May sale in New York. (Jussi Pylkkänen, the former global president of Christie’s and the founder of London-based Art Pylkkänen art advisory, told me the Fair Warning price “certainly encouraged Sotheby’s to quote a record estimate for their example.”)
Earlier this month, the auction upstart added Saara Pritchard, a former Christie’s and Sotheby’s specialist, as a partner. On Wednesday, it announced a new format, “No Warning,” where a work appears for sale with a single purchase price, for a short period of time.
Next, Christie’s is hoping to continue the momentum from its strong 20th and 21st century March triple header in London, when it took $264 million, by hosting an invitation-only, private selling show at the opening of the Venice Biennale in May. It’s titled “Ghost Pavilion: A Venice Revealed.” Located at the Palazzo Ca’ Dario, it will feature top works by J. M. W. Turner, Édouard Manet, and Titian. There will also be contemporary works by Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, and Mark Bradford.
“It will be dramatic,” Meyer said. “The venue is striking and the show reflects how we are constantly renewing our models and client experiences. The palazzo itself has a haunted reputation, so the exhibition theme explores dreams, nightmares, ghosts, and death.”
If hosting the most spectacular, experience-led, private selling exhibitions were a game of one-upmanship, Christie’s Venice outing might just give it the edge over Sotheby’s “The Apartment.” The bar has been set. Watch this space.
Pylkkänen, who sometimes takes to the rostrum for Fair Warning, told me that private sales are being boosted by a new upper tier of collectors that have become wary of buying at auction. This stratum, created over the last 15 years as the art market has globalized, focuses on acquiring masterpieces, he said.
“The market expanded dramatically and became truly global—far beyond what even we at Sotheby’s and Christie’s anticipated,” he explained. As private buyers and institutions from Russia, China, and the Middle East began collecting major, museum-quality works aggressively, the sale of pieces valued about $20 million became “relatively standard,” Pylkkänen said. That shift, he added, pushed the market away from being “volume-driven” and toward “increasing polarization at the top end.” While such buyers dominated sales for masterpieces in the 2010s, that top tier of collectors now “want to mitigate the risks of buying at auction.”
Pylkkänen said that collectors are increasingly asking advisers which channel they should use to sell: public auction, private auction, or through a private sale. “Selling has become a more complicated and more nuanced choice than it was ever before. Fifteen years ago, it was straightforward. You put a major painting to auction, or you sold it privately to an individual through one agent. Owners of major works are increasingly turning to advisers to decide which channel to use.”
In December, Sotheby’s longtime head of private sales David Schrader—nicknamed “The Trader” to some—left to form a new secondary market gallery with Pace and Emmanuel Di Donna. After joining the house in 2017, Schrader was credited with transforming its approach to backroom deals. Rothschild, who was hired by him, said that Sotheby’s post-Schrader approach has been focused on “elevating the presentation and client engagement.”
“That said, we still need the everyday, purely transactional deal flow that David was amazing at,” he said. “He was focused on just getting as many pieces for sale as humanly possible.”
While both Rothschild and Meyer see private sales continuing to grow and possibly taking up an increasing share of their house’s business, neither expects them to replace public auctions.
