Regardless of a definite lack of fireworks, artwork market historical past was made tonight at Christie’s Rockefeller Middle salesroom when the gavel got here down on Marlene Dumas’s Miss January (1997). The portray made $11.5m—$13.2m with charges—changing into the costliest work by any dwelling feminine artist to promote at public sale.
The towering portrait, measuring 280cm in peak, depicts a magnificence queen stood confidently, nude from the waist down save for a single pink sock. It was bought from the gathering of the Miami mega-collectors Mera and Don Rubell, who acquired it from Galerie Paul Andriesse in Amsterdam greater than 20 years in the past.
Miss January was dropped at the podium halfway by means of Christie’s twenty first century night sale (this sale is ongoing and this text might be up to date to mirror the total public sale). Below the stewardship of auctioneer Yu-ge Wang, the work elicited simply two bids and swiftly went to its guarantor by way of Christie’s deputy chairman Sara Friedlander.
Miss January supplants the earlier record-holder, Propped (1992) by Jenny Saville, which in 2018 bought at Sotheby’s in London for £8.2m (£9.5m with charges, which was then round $12m). Tonight’s outcome additionally surpasses Dumas’s earlier public sale report, which was $6.3m for The Customer (1995), bought at Sotheby’s London in 2008.
Works by girls make up seven of the Christie’s sale’s prime 15 costliest heaps by pre-sale estimate, together with works by Simone Leigh, Cecily Brown and Julie Mehretu.
