Marino Marini Sculpture

A bidding battle for a Marino Marini sculpture last night was the highlight of back-to-back auctions of contemporary and 20th-century Italian art that raised more than double the total achieved in 2009.

Christie's International's Frieze Week evening sales in London made 38.2 million pounds ($61.15 million) as the bronze statue of a horseman ecstatically throwing out his arms sold for an artist record price of 4.5 million pounds, beating an estimate of as much as 1.8 million pounds.

"It was a great cast and had never been on the market before," the Brussels and Paris-based dealer Paolo Vedovi said of the Marini. "There's demand for great sculpture, as was shown by the Giacometti at Sotheby's in February."

Giacometti's life-size statue "L'Homme Qui Marche I" (Walking Man I) from Dresdner Bank AG's collection sold for 65 million pounds in London on Feb. 3. Yesterday's event showed that art would sell with realistic estimates, particularly among the 51 contemporary works selected to appeal to the collectors in London for the Frieze Art Fair and other events, dealers said.

The Italian material contributed a record 18.6 million pounds, beating a low estimate of 14.3 million pounds. Just 22 percent of the lots fell to Italian buyers, underlining the extent to which artists such as Marini, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni appeal to international buyers, said the auction house.

The four-foot (1.2 meter) Marini, "Cavaliere," one of an edition of five cast before 1955, was sold by the Swedish trade union, the Unionen, which had owned it for more than 50 years. It fell to an unidentified telephone buyer.