Warning: Artistic Nudity — This article includes artwork containing nudity. Viewer discretion is advised.
South African-born artist Marlene Dumas has shattered a global auction record after her 1997 painting Miss January sold for a jaw-dropping $13.6 million — more than R245 million.
The sale took place at a Christie’s auction held at the Rockefeller Centre in New York, with the event also streamed live on Instagram and YouTube.
Dumas’ painting currently holds the record for the most expensive painting ever sold by a living woman artist.
She surpassed the previous record held by British painter Jenny Saville, whose 1992 work Propped sold for £9.5 million (R228 million) at Sotheby’s in London in 2018.
However, while Miss January sets a new benchmark for living female artists, Dumas still trails behind top-selling male artists like Jeff Koons, whose sculpture Rabbit (1986) sold for a staggering $91.07 million (R1.65 billion) in 2019.
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Marlene Dumas’ ‘magnum opus’
Christie’s Deputy Chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Sara Friedlander, described Miss January as Dumas’ “magnum opus”.
“In this painting, Dumas triumphantly demonstrates a formal mastery of the woman’s body while simultaneously freeing it from a tradition of subjection, upending normalised concepts of the female nude through the lens of a male-centric history,” Friedlander said in a post-auction statement.
Born in Cape Town in 1953, Dumas has lived in Amsterdam since 1976 and continues to exhibit her work at the Galleria Paul Andriesse, where she debuted in 1977.
She represented the Netherlands at the 1995 Venice Biennale and was featured in the central exhibition space of the Biennale again in 2015.
Her long list of accolades includes the Düsseldorf Art Prize (2007), the Rolf Schock Prize in Visual Arts (2011), the Johannes Vermeer Award (2012), and the Hans Theo Richter Prize for Drawing and Graphic Art (2017).
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