South African-born artist Marlene Dumas has made history again. Her 1997 painting Miss January sold for $13.6 million at Christie’s in New York, setting a new record for the most expensive work by a living female artist.
The sale cements Dumas’s position as a contemporary art giant and further highlights the growing recognition of female artists in a historically male-dominated market. Towering at over 9 feet, Miss January blends scale and symbolism. Sara Friedlander, Deputy Chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s, described Miss January as Marlene Dumas’s magnum opus, highlighting its monumental scale and also its unique subject matter.
The painting is praised for its “formal mastery of the woman’s body” and its rejection of traditional subjection. It draws from Dumas’s early life, referencing her childhood sketch Miss World and also her 1992 show Miss Interpreted, creating a dialogue between personal memory and societal critque.
This sale surpasses Jenny Saville’s 2018 record of $12.4 million and doubles Dumas’s previous high of $6.3 million for The Visitor (2008). Born in Cape Town in 1953, Dumas creates emotionally charged, psychologically rich portraits that explore race, gender, and also identity through fluid brushwork merging abstraction and figuration.
Raised during apartheid in South Africa, she studied art in Cape Town and the Netherlands, later adding psychology to her background. Based in Amsterdam, her work draws from photography and evokes deep emotional and societal themes. Dumas has exhibited worldwide and won awards like the 2011 Rolf Schock Prize. Major museums such as MoMA and Tate Modern also hold her paintings.
