Investors with a taste for fine painting will be able to buy a slice of a triptych by Francis Bacon when the piece goes on sale via an initial public offering in July.
“Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer,” a composition completed by the storied British artist in 1963, will be offered to investors at a valuation starting at around $55 million and a nominal value of the euro equivalent of $100 a share, according to Artex MTF AG. The Liechtenstein-based platform that’s aiming to establish itself as a marketplace for works of art said trading in shares of the triptych will start on July 21.
Artex is joining a field of fractional ownership that seeks to make investment in valuable items more accessible by splitting assets from diamonds to vintage cars and paintings that would normally be the preserve of the super-rich into shares that anyone can acquire. The firm says it operates like a trading bourse, with banks marketing a painting to their clients and a secondary market with real-time prices and brokers standing ready to buy or sell.
Inflation Hedge
Investors are on the hunt for assets seen as stores of value, Chief Executive Officer Yassir Benjelloun-Touimi, a co-founder along with Prince Wenceslas of Liechtenstein, told Bloomberg Television.
“In terms of timing we are lucky, we could not have dreamed for a better to time to launch this,” he said. “People will be looking for alternatives to bonds and equities, especially during a period of inflation.”
Even so, the offering comes at a time where art auction prices are no longer rising amid lingering recession fears.
One risk for Artex is that even with market makers, liquidity could be thin, meaning that buying or selling without moving the price sharply could prove tricky. Unlike with shares of companies, which typically publish quarterly earnings, there might be little newsflow to cause investors to change their view on the value of a work and thus generate opportunities to trade.
The work being offered is part of a series of five Dyer portrait triptychs created by Bacon between 1963 and 1969 and was sold at an auction in 2017 for nearly $52 million. Its subject Dyer was a “seemingly strong but fragile character with a history of petty crime,” with whom Bacon had a passionate and tormented relationship, according to Artex.
Here are more details of the offering:
- Issuer intends to initially list 385,000 class B EUR shares corresponding to 70% of the total at a price in euros equivalent to $100 per share through a secondary offering
- Pre-marketing phase expected to run from June 19 to July 19
- Book-building July 5-July 20
- Trading starts July 21