A painting by an Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu was sold for $10.7 million at Sotheby's auction in New York on Wednesday, making it the most expensive painting by an artist of African descent ever sold at auction.
The canvas was painted in 2008 and named after the eponymous poem by Langston Hughes, Walkers with the Dawn and Morning. The "hypnotically tumultuous and exactingly constructed" work celebrates "Black perseverance post-Hurricane Katrina" and "considers human resilience after unthinkable disaster," as Sotheby's described.
Notably, Mehretu broke her own recent record: last month at Sotheby's Hong Kong contemporary evening sale, her untitled diptych from 2001 was sold for $9.3 million, setting a new record for an artist of African descent, Sotheby's said on Instagram*.
Julie Mehretu was born in 1970 in Addis Ababa. Her family moved to the US in 1977 due to the unstable political situation in her homeland. She is known for her multi-layered paintings of large-scale and abstract landscapes dedicated to socio-political changes in modern cities.
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