Lisbon, Oct. 15, 2025 (Lusa) - Paula Rego's triptych ‘Ostrich Dancers from Walt Disney's film Fantasia’ goes up for auction in London on Wednesday, with a bidding base of £3 million (€3.5 million), according to auction house Christie's.
The triptych with an estimated bidding range of between £3 million and £5 million (between €3.5 million and €5.8 million) will be lot number 20 of 61 paintings and sculptures in the face-to-face auction dedicated to works by 20th and 21st century artists, according to Christie's website.
In 2023, a diptych from the same series “Ostrich Dancers” (1995) was sold for €3.5 million by the same auction house, becoming a new record for a work by the Portuguese artist, who died in 2022 in London, where she lived.
The set of three panels featuring ballerinas in black and pink-tipped costumes, to be auctioned today, is from the same series and thematic cycle. Still, they are separate and independent pieces within the series that Paula Rego developed, inspired by Walt Disney's film Fantasia.
The evening auction of 20th/21st century works will also bring together works by artists such as Lucian Freud, Picasso, René Magritte, Egon Schielle, Louise Bourgeois, Marc Chagall, Peter Doig, Claude Monet, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Damien Hirst and Gerhard Richter.
The ‘Ostrich Dancers’ series was previously part of the Saatchi Collection, created for the Hayward Gallery exhibition ‘Spellbound: Art and Film’ in 1996, and has been exhibited frequently over the last three decades.
In particular, it has been exhibited at the Tate Liverpool (1997), in the United Kingdom, at the Queen Sofia National Museum (2007-08), in Madrid, Spain, at the Musée de l'Orangerie, in Paris, France (2018-19), and at the Kestner Gesellschaft, in Hannover, Germany (2022-23).
Born in Lisbon in 1935, Paula Rego began drawing as a child. She left for the British capital at the age of 17 to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she took up residence and distinguished herself by the uniqueness of her work, inspired by literature and marked over the decades by her defence of women's rights.
In London, she met her husband, the English artist Victor Willing, who died in 1988, and whose work Paula Rego showed several times at the Casa das Histórias museum in Cascais.
In 2004, she was awarded the Grand Cross of the Military Order of Sant'Iago da Espada of Portugal by the President of the Republic, Jorge Sampaio. In 2010, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by the British Crown for her contribution to the arts.
In 2016, she received the medal of honour from the city of Lisbon.
In 2019, the painter was honoured with the Medal of Cultural Merit by the Ministry of Culture.
Paula Rego died on 8 June 2022, leaving behind a body of work represented in the most important public and private collections worldwide.
AG/ADB // ADB.
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