London's Hot Winter

The two-week set of major winter auctions in London that concluded Friday resulted in some of the strongest prices for contemporary art seen since the recession. Wednesday, Christie's sold $99.2 million worth of contemporary art, the most expensive batch of new art it has sold in London since the market reached a peak nearly three years ago.

Sotheby's and Christie's brought in $495 million combined from their evening and day sales of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art. That's down from last winter's $544 million total, mainly because dealers said the latest round didn't offer a masterpiece on par with last winter's $104.3 million Alberto Giacometti "Walking Man I." Sotheby's said it didn't mind the discrepancy, because it got an additional $150.6 million from an estate sale of George Kostalitz, while Christie's got $37.5 million from a stand-alone sale of Surrealist art.

After Phillips de Pury's $8.7 million evening sale on Thursday, Dutch collector Henk van den Berg said he expected new-art sales to keep rebounding: "I'd love to see more Americans bidding here, but all the other collectors are back."

Here are three artists who got a boost this time around:

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Sotheby's

WINNER: GERHARD RICHTER | The artist studied socialist realism as a youth, then fled East Germany with one suitcase just before the Berlin Wall went up. This 1990 work sold for $11.5 million, a bit above its high estimate.

GERHARD RICHTER: Since 2005, collectors of this 79-year-old German painter have paid around $375 million at auction for his works—more than any other living artist during the same span, according to research firm Art Research Technologies. His output ranges from blurred paintings of women to grid-like color charts to lush abstracts. An Asian telephone bidder paid Sotheby's $11.5 million for Mr. Richter's creamy 1990 "Abstract Picture" on Tuesday; the following night, a Russian-speaking telephone bidder paid Christie's $5.1 million for a smaller, slate-blue "Abstract Picture" the artist created that same year. Both prices exceeded high estimates.

ADRIANA VAREJÃO: The global appeal of Latin American artists keeps surging. A wall-sized tile work in which this Rio de Janeiro resident paid homage to Lucio Fontana's slashed canvases, "Wall With Incisions a la Fontana II," sold at Christie's for a record $1.7 million, nearly four times its high estimate.

GED QUINN: Ad executive Charles Saatchi is well known for spotting artistic potential and profiting from resales later. (See: Damien Hirst.) Liverpool painter Ged Quinn is another Saatchi favorite, and his prices are spiking. "Gone to Yours"—which weaves references to the Zodiac killer and "Fahrenheit 451" into a copy of a 1669 Claude Lorrain landscape painting—sold Wednesday for a record $309,393 at Christie's.