Ethiopian painter Julie Mehretu breaks auction record for an African artist.

Ethiopian-American painter Julie Mehretu has set an auction record for an African artist at the Sotheby’s Hong Kong contemporary evening sale last week. Untitled (2001), a vibrant diptych, sold for $9.32 million, beating the artist’s previous auction record of $6.5 million, set at an Artsy auction in 2021.

This auction result surpasses the previous record of $6.33 million for a work by an African artist, which was set in 2008 for The Visitor (1995) by South African artist Marlene Dumas.

Born in Addis Ababa in 1970 and currently based in the U.S., Mehretu's dynamic large-scale canvases have garnered widespread collector attention. The artist’s work first reached seven-figure-sums at auction in 2010, when her work Untitled I (2001) sold for $1.02 million.

Mehretu is currently represented by Marian Goodman Gallery in New York and White Cube in London, where her show “They departed into their own country another way” is on view at the latter’s branch in Bermondsey, South London.