Christie’s will offer Miss January by Marlene Dumas as a leading highlight of its 21st Century Evening Sale on 14 May at Rockefeller Center in New York. Carrying an estimate of $12 million to $18 million, the painting is the most significant work by Dumas to appear at auction and is poised to set the highest price at auction for an artwork by a living female artist.
The work comes to Christie’s from the Rubell Family Collection, one of the most distinguished private collections of contemporary art. The Rubell family is parting with the painting in order to continue its mission of collecting and championing emerging artists.
Painted in 1997, Miss January shows Dumas revisiting her first known drawing, Miss World, made thirty years earlier when she was ten years old. Depicting ten idealised forms of glamorous models, the earlier work foreshadowed the artist’s lifelong fascination with the female figure. The title also nods to Dumas’ first survey exhibition, Miss Interpreted, held at the Stedelijk in 1992, and to her 1988 painting Misinterpreted, often considered a self-portrait.
Dumas 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. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Tate, among others.
Since 2008 she has held major institutional retrospectives at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the Musée d’ Orsay in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Tate Modern in London, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Menil Collection in Houston.
(Press Release)
