Marlene Dumas is the most expensive new living artist at auction. Her Miss January sold for $13.6 million

Marlene Dumas ’ painting Miss January sold for $13.6 million during the 21st Century Evening Sale organized by Christie’s at New York’s Rockefeller Center on May 14, 2025. This result made Dumas the most expensive new living artist at auction. The 1997 work was estimated between $12 million and $18 million and was purchased by a collector who attended by phone, in contact with Sara Friedlander, Vice President of Postwar and Contemporary Art at Christie’s.

Miss January is considered the most significant work by Marlene Dumas ever to appear in an auction. It came from the Rubell Family Collection, one of the world’s most important private collections of contemporary art.

The artist is known for her intense and emotionally charged portraits, often inspired by found photographic images. Her production deals with themes such as sexuality, racial identity, suffering, motherhood and the female body, alternating between the desire to reveal and the urge to conceal.

Made in 1997, Miss January represents a revisitation of her very first known drawing, Miss World, made thirty years earlier when she was only ten years old. Ten idealized figures of glamorous models are depicted in the work, anticipating Dumas’ enduring interest in female representation. The title also refers to the artist’s first anthological exhibition, Miss Interpreted, held at the Stedelijk Museum in 1992, and recalls the 1988 painting Misinterpreted, often interpreted as a self-portrait.

Her works are in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Tate Modern in London. Since 2008, he has had major institutional retrospectives at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the 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.

“Through its monumental size and singular subject matter, Miss January is truly Marlene Dumas’ masterpiece,” said Sara Friedlander. “In this painting, Dumas triumphantly demonstrates a formal mastery of the female body while freeing it from a tradition of awe, overturning normalized concepts of the female nude through the lens of a male-centered story.”

Marlene Dumas is the most expensive new living artist at auction. Her Miss January sold for $13.6 million

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