Christie’s pulled in $96.5 million at its contemporary art auction on Wednesday, despite a relatively small selection of lots and no runaway blockbusters. It was a sign of a still-cautious art market, with both buyers and sellers acting conservatively. Even so, one work set a record: Marlene Dumas’s Miss January.
Painted in 1997, Miss January sold for $13.6 million to Christie’s deputy chair Sara Friedlander, who was bidding on behalf of a client. The sellers were Don and Mera Rubell, prominent collectors based in Miami, who rarely part with pieces from their 5,000-plus item collection. The $13.6 million sale is now the highest ever paid for a work by a living female visual artist. The previous record belonged to Jenny Saville, whose painting fetched $12.4 million at Sotheby’s London in 2018. Adjusted for inflation, that would be approximately $15.7 million today—about $2.1 million more than the new mark. Still, compared to Dumas’s previous auction record—The Visitor, which sold for $6.33 million at Sotheby’s London in July 2008—this is a striking leap forward.
Born in South Africa but based in Amsterdam since 1976, Marlene Dumas is one of the most influential painters of the past few decades. Over the past forty years, her work has persistently explored the complexities of identity and representation. Her paintings and drawings—often focused on the human figure—reference a vast archive of source images she has collected over time, ranging from art history and media snapshots to intimate personal photos of friends and family. All of Dumas’s works, in essence, present the body in its full reality. The body takes control, asserting itself loudly: rendered in images that are fleshy, unsettling, vulnerable, angry, subversive, mortal, impulsive, unruly, and defiant.
In recent years, she has been the subject of major exhibitions around the world. Three years ago, the Palazzo Grassi in Venice hosted Marlene Dumas: open-end, a comprehensive retrospective. In 2021, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris held Marlene Dumas: Le Spleen de Paris, showcasing her work in dialogue with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. Back in 2014, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam launched a major retrospective titled Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden, which went on to travel to Tate Modern in London and Fondation Beyeler in Basel. Currently, her work is on view at David Zwirner Gallery in New York, as part of Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York, an exhibition featuring eight artists who played key roles in the revival and spread of figurative painting in the 1990s. Dumas’s work is on display alongside that of John Currin, Peter Doig, Chris Ofili, Laura Owens, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans, and Lisa Yuskavage through July 17.