Oliver Barker

Oliver joined Sotheby’s in June 1994. He was Deputy Head of the European Impressionist & Modern Art Department in London before moving to the European Contemporary Art Department in 2001. In 2008 he was the driving force behind the groundbreaking Damien Hirst sale, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, which totaled £111 million and established a world record for a single-artist sale. In 2012 he auctioned Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (809-4) for £21.3m, creating a new auction record at the time for the work of any living artist.

Oliver was instrumental in organizing the (RED) auction in New York in 2008, which raised over $40 million to benefit the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. In 2011 he was integral to the success of high profile sales in aid of the Whitechapel Gallery, NSPCC and the HOPING Foundation as well as The Sick Children’s Trust. In the past three years he has auctioned over £7 million of art for charitable concerns.