Largest Paula Rego Work Ever to Come to Auction to Be Sold in London This October

Paula Rego b. 1935, Portugal Follow +

A multimillion-pound triptych by the late Portuguese British painter Paula Rego will feature in the Christie’s London 20th/21st Century Evening Sale on 15 October.

Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ (1995) is the largest work by the artist to ever appear at auction. Each of the three monumental panels is 150 by 150 centimetres.

The only other work to be sold from the Dancing Ostriches series was a diptych in October 2023, a year after the artist’s death, also at Christie’s London. The panels, previously owned by famed British collector Charles Saatchi, hammered at £2.5 million, within their estimate of £2.2–3.2 million and breaking the artist’s auction record.

The estimate this time around is £3–5 million, as Christie’s angles to set a new record for Rego. The auction house has described the triptych as ‘the largest and most accomplished’ of the Disney-inspired series.

The Dancing Ostriches series was originally commissioned by London’s Hayward Gallery on the occasion of the 1996 group exhibition Spellbound, featuring new work by major British artists to celebrate 100 years of cinema. Rego’s contribution took inspiration from the 1940 animated classic Fantasia, specifically the sequence in which ostriches and other animals in tutus perform the Dance of the Hours ballet.

This triptych has previously been exhibited at Tate Liverpool for the artist’s 1997 retrospective and more recently in Les contes cruels de Paula Rego, the first solo exhibition of a living artist at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, from 2018 to 2019.

‘With Dancing Ostriches, Paula Rego transforms Disney’s animated feathered dancers into real women, each imbued with power, grace, and the vulnerabilities of female experience,’ Katharine Arnold, head of European postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, tells Ocula. ‘Rendered in pastel, a medium that would come to define Rego’s practice, the triptych format emphasises the work’s scale, placing it among her most significant creations.’

Christie’s has also announced early paintings by Lucian Freud and two Peter Doig canvases as additional standouts in the upcoming Evening Sale. At competitor Sotheby’s, works already announced ahead of their London Contemporary Evening Sale on 16 October include two Francis Bacon works, Untitled (The Arm) (1982) by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and an abstract painting by Lucy Bull, who staged her first U.S. museum show at ICA Miami earlier this year.

Meanwhile, across Mayfair at Phillips London, whose sale falls on the same evening as Sotheby’s this year, American figurative painter Sasha Gordon will make her U.K. auction debut with Drive Through (2019). —[O]

Main image: Paula Rego, Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney's 'Fantasia' (1995) (detail). Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium, in three parts. 150 x 150 cm (each). Christie's Images Ltd, 2025.