Marlene Dumas painting sets new record for living female artist

By Jack Guy, CNN

(CNN) — A painting by South African artist Marlene Dumas has sold for $13.6 million at auction, setting a new record for a living female artist.

“Miss January” is Dumas’ “magnum opus” and stands 9.25 feet (2.82 meters) tall, according to a statement from auction house Christie’s on Wednesday.

“We were thrilled with the outcome of our sale this evening,” Isabella Lauria, head of the 21st century evening sale, said in the statement, calling the price “incredible.”

The painting had been expected to fetch between $12 million and $18 million, according to a separate statement from Christie’s published earlier this month.

“Through its monumental scale and singular subject matter, Miss January is truly the magnum opus of Marlene Dumas,” said Sara Friedlander, deputy chairman of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s, in the May 2 statement.

“In this painting, Dumas triumphantly demonstrates a formal mastery of the woman’s body while simultaneously freeing it from a tradition of subjection, upending normalized concepts of the female nude through the lens of a male-centric history,” she added.

Painted in 1997, the work sees Dumas revisit “Miss World,” an artwork depicting the forms of 10 models, which she painted 30 years prior at the age of 10.

Today, Dumas is known as one of the most influential painters in the world, according to Christie’s, which said she “is known for her emotionally charged, psychologically complex portraits — often based on found photographs — which explore themes of sexuality, race, grief, motherhood, and the body.”

While the sale of “Miss January” sets a new record price for a work of art by a living female artist, works by male artists have traditionally sold for much more.

At Wednesday’s auction, a 1982 triple portrait by Jean-Michel Basquiat, titled “Baby Boom,” sold for $23.4 million, and the record for the most expensive artwork by a living male artist is the $90.3 million paid for US artist Jeff Koons’ “Rabbit” sculpture in 2019.

And the gender gap in valuations is a systemic issue, according to 2022 BBC documentary “Recalculating Art,” which found that works by female artists sell for 10% of the value of those by men.

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