Shipping costs are usually directly related to the size of the sculpture, rather than its market value (though the two are often correlated). ‘By default, larger pieces and sculptures in particular will be more expensive to move and, like everyone, we have been greatly affected by the cost-of-living crisis,’ says Joe Piotrowski, the director of art handling company Gander & White’s Miami branch. Shipping costs have been increasing more rapidly in the past few years, in particular due to the impact on global energy prices resulting from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Piotrowski adds. Using sea freight can bring down costs for shipping large works, but is often not quick enough for getting pieces to art fairs and other time-limited exhibitions.
There is a certain challenge, then, to collecting large-scale sculpture that can appeal to some collectors. ‘It’s hard to find good, large sculptures,’ Pérez says. ‘It’s not something that happens every day, like with paintings. You may only find one or two in an auction and galleries don’t often have room for it.’ Pérez says that he typically pays anywhere between USD 100,000 and USD 5 million for a single sculpture, and he finds works in a variety of places. Concerns that tariffs placed by the US President Donald Trump on raw materials such as aluminum and steel would affect the cost of sculpture production have not yet materialized. ‘So far, the tariffs haven’t affected art purchases in Europe or Latin America,’ Pérez says. ‘We have seen an increase in shipping costs and, of course, increases because of the weakness of the dollar versus the euro and the pound.’