Marlene Dumas painting set to break auction record for a work by a living woman artist

A painting by Marlene Dumas going up for auction this month at Christie’s New York will likely break the record for the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a living woman artist. Miss January (1997) by Marlene Dumas will be included in Christie’s 21st century evening sale on 14 May. The painting, which shows a woman nude from the waist down except for a single pink sock, is estimated to sell for between $12m and $18m.

Miss January comes from the collection of Mera and Don Rubell, the Miami-based art power couple who founded the Rubell Museum—which now has branches in Miami and Washington, DC—in 1993. The Rubells acquired the painting from Galerie Paul Andriesse in Amsterdam more than 20 years ago, and decided to sell it to “continue the family’s mission of collecting and championing emerging artists”, according to a statement from Christie’s.

With a third-party guarantee, Miss January will almost certainly break the record for a work by a female living artist at auction, currently held by Jenny Saville’s painting Propped (1992), which sold for £8.25m (£9.5m with fees) in 2018 at Sotheby’s London (that landmark moment was overshadowed in the media when, during the same sale, a Banksy canvas that had just sold slipped through its frame and partially shredded itself). Dumas’s current record at auction is $6.3m (with fees), set in 2008 at a Sotheby’s auction in London, by The Visitor (1995). Her work is known to sell for more on the private market.

“Through its monumental scale and singular subject matter, Miss January is truly the magnum opus of Marlene Dumas,” Sara Friedlander, Christie’s deputy chairman of post-war and contemporary art, said in a 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 normalised concepts of the female nude through the lens of a male-centric history.”

Dumas, now aged 71, is known for her daring depictions of subjects like death, violence, sexuality and race. Miss January is believed to have been inspired by a “big-breasted Suzanne Somers look-alike” the artist found posing as the centrefold of a pornographic magazine, the artist told W Magazine in 2008.

While the auction houses have been hit hard by the soft art market, Christie’s has managed to secure some strong consignments this season along with Miss January: A triptych by Jean-Michel Basquiat comes with an estimate between $20m and $30m, Andy Warhol’s electric chair canvas is expected to fetch in excess of $30m and a riverscape by Claude Monet is estimated to sell for between $30m and $50m.