A Marlene Dumas portray hammered for $13.6 million throughout a Christie’s sale tonight, making the South African painter the most costly residing feminine artist at public sale.
The portray, titled Miss January (1997), had an estimate of $12 million to $18 million, nearly guaranteeing that it might break a file. It was additionally a last-minute consignment from the gathering of the Rubell Household, which often seems on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors listing. It additionally had a third-party assure.
The Dumas portrait offered comparatively shortly and was finally received by an nameless phone bidder represented by Sara Friedlander, Christie’s deputy chairman for postwar and modern artwork.
Bidding opened at $9 million. When it lastly hammered at $11.5 million earlier than charges, the salesroom burst into applause.
Miss January finds Dumas revisiting her very first identified drawing, Miss World, which she made 30 years earlier, when she was simply 10 years outdated. The title of the portray additionally refers to Dumas’s first survey exhibition, “Miss Interpreted,” which passed off at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 1992, and to her 1988 portray Misinterpreted, which is usually thought of a self-portrait.
Dumas broke the file set by Jenny Saville in 2018 after the nude self-portrait Propped (1992) sold for record-shattering £9.5 million ($12.4 million) towards an estimate of £3 million to £4 million in October 2018 at Sotheby’s London.
The earlier public sale file for Dumas was for the 1995 work The Customer, which offered in July 2008 for $6.33 million (£3.18 million together with charges) at Sotheby’s London.
Among the many high 10 general public sale outcomes for Dumas, seven exceeded excessive estimates after purchaser’s premiums, and 6 of the gross sales passed off in New York.
Between 2022 and 2024, 15 works by Dumas have offered at public sale, however solely 5 went for $1 million and up, and solely two of these seven-figure gross sales exceeded excessive estimates after charges have been included.
A lot of the works by Dumas that appeared at public sale throughout this three-year interval have been offered in Paris, London, and Hong Kong, in accordance with the information from the Artnet Worth Database.
The Rubells’ consignment of the portray Miss January was notable, in that the household has not often offered artwork from its holdings. In 2013, Don Rubell told the New York Times, “In 50 years of amassing, we’ve put collectively over 5,000 items and we’ve offered lower than 20.”
The portray had beforehand appeared on the Rubells’ personal museum in Miami throughout Artwork Basel Miami Seaside final December.
