A portray by Marlene Dumas is predicted to interrupt the document for the most costly art work offered at public sale by a residing girl artist when it’s provided at Christie’s New York on Could 14th. Miss January (1997), which depicts a blonde girl nude from the waist down aside from a single pink sock, holds an estimate of $12 million to $18 million. It will likely be included within the public sale home’s twenty first century night sale.
The present document for a residing girl artist is held by Propped (1992) by Jenny Saville, which offered for £9.5 million ($12.69 million) at Sotheby’s London in 2018. That sale was broadly coated on the time, not for Saville’s milestone, however for a Banksy canvas that shredded itself moments after it was offered. Dumas’s present public sale document stands at $6.32 million for The Customer (1995), which offered at Sotheby’s London in 2008.
Miss January comes from the gathering of Mera and Don Rubell, longtime collectors and the founders of the Rubell Museum, which has places in Miami and Washington, D.C. The couple acquired the work greater than twenty years in the past from Galerie Paul Andriesse in Amsterdam. In a press release launched by Christie’s, the Rubells are promoting the work to “proceed the household’s mission of accumulating and championing rising artists.”
“By way of its monumental scale and singular material, Miss January is actually the magnum opus of Marlene Dumas,” mentioned Sara Friedlander, deputy chairman of post-war and modern artwork at Christie’s. “On this portray, Dumas triumphantly demonstrates a proper mastery of the lady’s physique whereas concurrently liberating it from a practice of subjection, upending normalized ideas of the feminine nude via the lens of a male-centric historical past.”
Christie’s has secured a number of high-profile consignments for its Could night gross sales regardless of a broader downturn within the artwork market. Different highlights embody an electric chair silkscreen by Andy Warhol anticipated to fetch greater than $30 million, and a Jean-Michel Basquiat triptych estimated at $20 million–$30 million.
