Sotheby's held its Contemporary Evening Auction on New Bond Street on Thursday 15 October 2026, the Thursday of Frieze week.
Sotheby’s timed its 2026 Contemporary Evening Auction to Frieze, calling it at Sotheby’s on New Bond Street in Mayfair on Thursday 15 October 2026.
Samuel Baker sold his first lot in London in 1744. 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.
The house moved to 34 to 35 New Bond Street in 1917 and became a picture house only in the twentieth century. The Contemporary Evening Auction is the newest end of that business.
An evening sale is the format the trade watches, because there the market prices itself in public. The estimates are published in advance, and the hammer confirms or contradicts them in front of the people who set them. The timing put the international collectors in London for the fair in the room.
The season ran from post-war abstraction and Pop to a generation still establishing itself, with a weight of twentieth-century German art. Phillips held its own evening sale two hours earlier and four streets away.