Lisbon, Oct. 8, 2025 (Lusa) - Late Portuguese artist Paula Rego's triptych ‘Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney's “Fantasia”’ will be auctioned in London on 15 October, with a starting bid of £3 million (€3.5 million), according to auction house Christie's.
The triptych, with an estimated bid of between £3 million and £5 million (between €3.5 million and €5.8 million), will be lot number 20 of 61 lots of paintings and sculptures in the live auction dedicated to works by 20th and 21st century artists, according to Christie's website.
In 2023, a diptych from the same series, ‘Avestruzes Bailarinas’ (1995), was sold for €3.5 million by the same auction house, setting a new record for a work by the Portuguese artist, who died in 2022 in London, where she lived.
The set of three panels with ballerinas dressed in black and pink tips to be auctioned on 15 October is from the same series and thematic cycle, but they are separate and independent pieces within the set that Paula Rego developed, inspired by Disney's film ‘Fantasia’.
The evening auction of 20th/21st century works scheduled for the 15th will bring together works by artists such as Lucian Freud, Picasso, René Magritte, Egon Schiele, Louise Bourgeois, Marc Chagall, Peter Doig, Claude Monet, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Damien Hirst and Gerhard Richter.
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's ‘Spellbound: Art and Film’ exhibition in 1996, and has been exhibited frequently over the last three decades.
It has been exhibited at Tate Liverpool (1997) in the United Kingdom, the Reina Sofía National Museum (2007-08) in Madrid, Spain, the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, France (2018-19), and the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover, Germany (2022-23).
Born in Lisbon, Paula Rego began drawing as a child and left for the British capital at the age of 17 to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she would settle and distinguish herself for the uniqueness of her work, inspired by literature and marked, over the decades, by the defence of women's rights.
In London, she met her husband, the English artist Victor Willing, who died in 1988, whose work Paula Rego exhibited several times at the Casa das Histórias museum in Cascais, in the Lisbon region.
In 2004, she was awarded the Grand Cross of the Military Order of Sant'Iago da Espada de Portugal by the country's president, Jorge Sampaio, and in 2010, she was named 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 awarded 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 several of the most important public and private collections around the world.
AG/AYLS // AYLS
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