A painting by South African artist Marlene Dumas has made headlines by selling for an impressive $13.6 million at auction — the highest price ever paid for a work by a living female artist.

The piece, titled Miss January, is a monumental 9.25-foot-tall (2.82 meters) painting that Christie’s auction house describes as Dumas’ “magnum opus.” The sale took place on Wednesday, exceeding expectations and making waves in the art world.

Isabella Lauria, head of Christie’s 21st-century evening sale, expressed excitement about the result. “We were thrilled with the outcome of our sale this evening,” she said. “The price is incredible.”

Before the auction, Christie’s had estimated the painting would fetch between $12 million and $18 million. Sara Friedlander, Christie’s deputy chairman of post-war and contemporary art, praised Miss January as a powerful work that challenges traditional views of the female body.

“Through its monumental scale and singular subject matter, Miss January is truly the magnum opus of Marlene Dumas,” Friedlander said. She added that the painting “upends normalized concepts of the female nude through the lens of a male-centric history,” highlighting Dumas’ skillful and provocative artistry.

Painted in 1997, Miss January revisits an earlier work by Dumas called Miss World, which she created 30 years prior when she was just 10 years old. Today, Dumas is recognized globally as one of the most influential contemporary painters. Christie’s describes her work as emotionally charged portraits that explore complex themes like sexuality, race, grief, motherhood, and the human body, often inspired by found photographs.

Despite this record-breaking sale, a significant gender gap remains in the art market. Male artists’ works typically sell for far higher amounts. For example, on the same night, a 1982 triple portrait by Jean-Michel Basquiat titled Baby Boom sold for $23.4 million. The record for the most expensive artwork by a living male artist is still held by Jeff Koons’ Rabbit sculpture, which sold for $90.3 million in 2019.

This disparity is part of a larger systemic issue. A 2022 BBC documentary titled Recalculating Art found that works by female artists sell for only about 10% of the value of those by male artists, highlighting ongoing challenges in achieving equality in the art world.

Source: CNN – Marlene Dumas painting sets new record for living female artist

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A Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur has followed through on his promise to eat the banana featured in Maurizio Cattelan’s $6.2 million artwork, Comedian. The infamous piece, which consists of a banana taped to a wall, was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in New York last week.

Justin Sun, who runs the Tron blockchain network, outbid six others to purchase the artwork. During a press conference in Hong Kong, he ate the banana to make a statement about the connection between art and cryptocurrency.

The banana is regularly replaced before exhibitions, and Sun bought the rights to display the piece along with a guide on how to replace the fruit. Although the banana has been eaten twice before—once by a performance artist in 2019 and again by a South Korean student in 2023—neither of them paid for the privilege like Sun did.

“Eating it at a press conference can also become a part of the artwork’s history,” Sun said. “It’s much better than other bananas,” he joked.

Sun, 34, admitted he was curious about the banana’s lifespan, saying he had “dumb questions” about whether the fruit would rot. According to The New York Times, the fresh banana was purchased for 35 cents the day of the auction but became one of the most expensive fruits in the world after Sun’s purchase.

At the auction, each attendee received a banana and duct tape as a souvenir. Sun remarked, “Everyone has a banana to eat.”

Sun is also a well-known figure in the cryptocurrency world, where he runs the Tron blockchain—a platform for digital currency transactions. He compared the banana artwork to NFTs (non-fungible tokens), a form of digital art that holds no intrinsic value beyond what people are willing to assign to it. Sun’s platform allows users to trade NFTs.

Last year, Sun was charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for offering unregistered security tokens, a case he denies. This week, he revealed he invested $30 million in a crypto project backed by US President-elect Donald Trump.

Source

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