Postwar works, Top 5 of 2025: when the market started chasing “fetishes” again

There is a moment, before every important purchase, when an artwork stops being an image and becomes a question. Not “how much is it worth?”, but: what place does it occupy in my life? And above all: what does it say about me, right now, as I choose it?

2025, at least in the slice of the market that captured the spotlight, told exactly this story: the return of the artwork as a threshold. Not merely a safe asset, not just a “name” to add to a collection, but a psychological device. An artwork that separates an inside from an outside: home and museum, private biography and public history, desire and decision.

To truly read that postwar “top 5”, there’s no need to list auction results. What’s needed is to place oneself—honestly—on the client’s side: not the naïve client, but the one who knows that every purchase is also a declaration.

Lalanne’s hippopotamus bar, for example, is not simply a luxury whim. It is a stage set. In a home it becomes a sentence spoken without words: I choose irony as a form of power. It is design disguised as an animal, reminding us that art can sit in the living room without asking permission. Function (bar, compartments, opening mechanisms) does not “lower” the work; it makes it more insidious, because it inserts it into everyday life. And this, ultimately, is what the client buys: the possibility of inhabiting a symbol.

The rhinoceros desk does the same, but with a different mask: it turns the act of writing—that is, of order—into a theatrical gesture. The client does not buy a piece of furniture. They buy a way of thinking about their own discipline, their own idea of control.

And then there is Klein. Here the purchase becomes almost the opposite: not a narrative object, but an absolute. The blue does not tell you a story; it asks you to enter it. For a client, such a monochrome is not “simple” (it only seems so to those who look from the outside): it is a radical choice, because it binds you to an experience. It forces you to live with the question: what do I see, when there is nothing to recognize?

This is the key: when the present is full of noise, certain works function like decompression chambers. The client buys a blue to buy silence. Or, more precisely, they buy a place where thought can begin again from scratch.

Hockney, with a double portrait that is intimacy, time, posture, takes the client into yet another room: that of identity. Here one does not buy the idea of infinity, but the idea of truth. The artwork is not a banner; it is a presence. It looks at you as you look at it. And if a client desires it, it is often because they want a sharp jolt of reality: an image that cannot be scrolled away, an interior that is not decoration but memory.

In these cases, the purchase resembles a stance taken: my collection must not only impress, it must speak. And to speak means accepting the risk of complexity, of history, of intersecting readings.

The word “fetish” is often used superficially, as a synonym for caprice. But a fetish, in reality, is an object that concentrates energy. A condenser of desire, prestige, fear of missing out, and the need to choose.

This is what 2025 rewarded: works that do not sit quietly. Works that, the moment they enter a room, change it. Not because they are “big”, but because they are inevitable.