This South African just set a new record for the most expensive painting sold by a living female artist: Here’s the $13.6 million artwork
Marlene Dumas redefined the value of living female artists overnight with this artwork.
In May 2025, Marlene Dumas’s painting Miss January sold for $13.6 million at Christie’s in New York, setting a new auction record for a living female artist.
This sale surpassed the previous record held by Jenny Saville’s Propped, which sold for $12.4 million in 2018.
“Through its monumental scale and singular subject matter, Miss January is truly the magnum opus of Marlene Dumas,” said Sara Friedlander, deputy chairman of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s.
“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,” she added.
“We were thrilled with the outcome of our sale this evening,” Isabella Lauria, head of the 21st century evening sale, added in the statement by Friedlander.
Marlene Dumas was born in 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa, is based in the Netherlands. She studied art at the University of Cape Town and Ateliers ’63 in Haarlem, and psychology at the University of Amsterdam.
Miss January, painted in 1997, is a 10-foot-tall oil on canvas depicting a nude woman from the waist down, wearing a single pink sock. The work is characteristic of Dumas’s style, known for its emotionally charged and psychologically complex portraits that often explore themes of sexuality, race, and the human body.
The painting was consigned by the Rubell Family Collection, a prominent private collection of contemporary art. The Rubells sold the piece to fund their ongoing support for emerging artists.
Dumas was not the only artist to see her work go for huge fees: a 1982 triple portrait by Jean-Michel Basquiat, named Baby Boom, sold for $23.4 million.
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