There is a strong chance you’re now asking yourself some variation of a question we have all asked too many times since early 2020: What the hell?Īll the more reason, then, to explore who exactly Mr.

Between September 2020 and February 2021, five more of the artist’s works changed hands at prices above $100,000, including the large-scale painting Summer (2019) for more than $320,000 last December. While that sale remains the artist’s auction record, it is not an anomaly. Doodle canvas titled Spring (2019) at Tokyo Chuo Auction Company.

Yet before the summer was over, a bidder agreed to pay just shy of $1 million ($994,238, to be exact) for a monumental green-and-black Mr. (All prices include premiums unless otherwise noted, and come courtesy of the Artnet Price Database.) Doodle didn’t even register his first public auction result until March 25, 2020, when an edition of his resin figurine, The Doodler (2019), sold for an above-estimate $2,006 in an auction held by the east Asia-based Ravenel International Art Group.

His name has never graced the wall of a New York gallery, blue-chip art-fair booth, or major Western museum program. Ask a close observer of the art market to name 2020’s biggest auction successes under 40, and the odds are good that they’ll nail one or both of the top two sellers: the late Matthew Wong ($24.7 million in total fine-art sales) and the fast-rising Amoako Boafo ($8.2 million).īut precious few people in the industry are likely to identify the fifth-place artist, even though his works amassed nearly $4.7 million in salesrooms across three continents in just over nine months.

Sam cox doodle