The triptych “Dancing Ostriches from the film ‘Fantasia’ by Walt Disney”, by Paula Rego, was sold this Wednesday, October 15, at auction for 3.5 million pounds (around four million euros) at an auction in London.
The unidentified buyer placed a bid of 2.8 million pounds (3.2 million euros), a value that, including purchase costs, rose to 3,466,000 pounds (3,987,000 euros).
In 2023, a different diptych from the same series “Ostrizes Bailarinas” (1995) was sold for 3.5 million euros, also by the British auction house Christie’s, at the time a record for a work by the Portuguese artist.
The work auctioned this Wednesday at an event dedicated to works by artists from the 20th and 21st centuries had a bidding estimate of between three and five million pounds (between 3.5 and 5.8 million euros).
The set of three panels with the dancers dressed in black and pink tips is part of a series and thematic cycle of paintings inspired by the Disney film “Fantasia”.
According to the documentation, this work was requested for loan to the Munch Museum, located in Oslo, Norway, in 2026.
Inspired by the film by American director Walt Disney, the “Dancing Ostriches” 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.
It was exhibited, in particular, at 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).
In Portugal, it was on display at the Centro Cultural de Belém and Casa das Histórias Paula Rego.
Born in Lisbon, Paula Rego, traveled to the British capital at the age of 17, to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she would take up residence and distinguish herself for the singularity of her work, inspired by literature, and marked, over the decades, by the defense of women’s rights.
Paula Rego died on June 8, 2022, leaving a work represented in several of the most important public and private collections around the world.