Sotheby's holds its Contemporary Evening Auction on New Bond Street at seven on Thursday 15 October 2026, the Thursday of Frieze week.
Samuel Baker sold his first lot in London in 1744, a library of several hundred books, and the house that grew out of that sale is the oldest of the international auctioneers still trading. It dealt in books for its first century and a half, moved to 34 to 35 New Bond Street in 1917, and only became a picture house in the twentieth century. The Contemporary Evening Auction is the newest end of that business and now the loudest part of it.
An evening sale is the format the trade watches because it is the market pricing itself in public. Thirty or forty lots are called in an hour, the estimates are published in advance, and the hammer either confirms or contradicts them in front of the people who set them. The Contemporary sale is timed to Frieze so that the international collectors already in London for the fair are in the room.
The 2026 sale is called at seven on Thursday 15 October on New Bond Street. The season runs from post-war abstraction and Pop to a generation still establishing itself, with a particular weight of twentieth-century German art. Consignments were still being taken in late August, so the lot list is not yet published. Phillips holds its own evening sale two hours earlier and four streets away that same Thursday, which is how the week is built.