Christie's NY Auction 2025
Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale
May 14, 2025
Rockefeller Center saleroom, New York
In total, the sale achieved $96.5 million, selling 92% by lot and 97% by value bringing the week’s running total to $626.5 million. The top lot of the sale was Baby Boom, a 1982 triple portrait by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which sold for $23.4 million.
The sale showcased an array of the finest art from the post-war and contemporary eras, beginning with a dedicated group, For Art’s Sake: Selected Works by Tiqui Atencio & Ago Demirdjian. The selection achieved a combined total of $25.4 million, led by Cecily Brown’s Bedtime Story, which sold for $6.2 million. Records were set for four artists in total, including Marlene Dumas whose magnum opus Miss January sold for $13.6 million, establishing a new record price for work of art by a living female artist to sell at auction.
RECORDS
-Marlene Dumas, Miss January sold for $13,635,000
-Simone Leigh, Sentinel IV sold for $5,737,000
-Louis Fratino, You and Your Things sold for $756,000
-Emma McIntyre, Up bubbles her amorous breath sold for $201,600
EMMA MCINTYRE (B. 1990, New Zealand)
Up bubbles her amorous breath
Estimate: USD 50,000 – USD 70,000
Price realised: USD 201,600
Emma McIntyre creates vivid abstractions imbued with chromatic and gestural energy. Instinctual yet deeply considered, her canvases explore painting’s material and alchemical possibilities. Employing oils and unconventional substances, she pairs chance-based, intuitive processes with a repertoire of motifs and compositional strategies gleaned from a close study of art history, reformulating these divergent threads into a fresh and unbridled mode of painting that is uniquely her own.
LUCAS ARRUDA (B. 1983, Brazil)
Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series)
Estimate: USD 200,000 – USD 300,000
Price realised: USD 378,000
Lucas Arruda’s meditative compositions blur the lines between mnemonic and imaginative registers. His evocative landscapes are more a product of a state of mind than any particular locale. As he notes, "The only reason to call my works landscapes is cultural – it’s simply that viewers automatically register my format as a landscape, although none of the images can be traced to a geographic location. It’s the idea of landscape as a structure, rather than a real place."
DANIELLE MCKINNEY (B. 1981, the USA)
The Fool
Estimate: USD 50,000 – USD 70,000
Price realised: USD 207,900
Danielle McKinney’s interior scenes capture moments of human introspection and intimacy with painterly lyricism. McKinney builds her compositions from an all-black canvas, resulting in scenes emerging from darkness in chiaroscuro fashion. Like dioramas, these domestic spaces are carefully composed. The atmospheric compositions are interspersed with shimmering highlights of colour: the faint glow of a lit cigarette, held by protagonists with brightly coloured lips and fiercely painted fingernails.
The figures, exclusively Black and female, are seen cherishing moments of solitude. As a trained photographer, McKinney arranges her subjects cinematographically. Her figures command the space in which they find themselves, opening opportunities for endless narrative strands and self-exploration.
LOUIS FRATINO (B. 1993, the USA)
You and Your Things
Estimate: USD 600,000 – USD 800,000
Price realised: USD 756,000
Louis Fratino synthesises his own experiences, memories, and fantasies in his intimate, sensual paintings of gay life in the metropolis. In his celebrated male nudes, scenes of entangled bodies, and pictures of subway passengers peering at their reflections, Fratino imbues contemporary subject matter with art historical references. Evoking tenets of Cubism and Fauvism, his paintings often embrace the styles and palettes of early 20th-century modernists such as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, and Henri Matisse.
SARAH SZE (B. 1969, the USA)FlickerEstimate: USD 400,000 – USD 600,000Price realised: USD 819,000
Sarah Sze gleans objects and images from worlds both physical and digital, assembling them into complex multimedia works that shift scale between microscopic observation and macroscopic perspective on the infinite. A peerless bricoleur, Sze moves with a light touch across proliferating media. Her dynamic, generative body of work spans sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video, and installation while always addressing the precarious nature of materiality and grappling with matters of entropy and temporality. “Art is a timekeeper; it endows breath into materials. It is a travelling message between humans across centuries.” — Sarah Sze.