The record-breaking female artists of 2025

The gender gap runs into the millions at auction but in 2025 ten female artists helped close it. Here are the artists who made the headlines with record sales. Works by surrealists Remedios Varo and Dorothea Tanning were in demand, the latter emerging from the shadow of her male partner, just as Sophie Taeuber-Arp did when she broke the $3m barrier.

1. Frida Kahlo

El sueño (La cama) (1940) set a new auction record for the Mexican artist and for any female artist, when it sold for $54.66m at Sotheby's New York in November. It was nearly $20m above Kahlo's previous record sale, set at Sotheby's in 2021.

2. Marlene Dumas

Miss January (1997) set a new auction record for the Netherlands-based, South African artist when it sold for $13.63m at Christie's New York in May, $7.31m above Dumas's previous record sale. The painting, which was consigned by the Rubell family, also set a new record for a living female artist.

3. Cecily Brown

High Society (1999) set a new record for the New York-based artist when it fetched $9.81m at Sotheby's New York in November. It was $3m above her previous record sale. Brown has a solo show at Serpentine Galleries, giving visitors to London a chance to see more of the British-American painter’s work.

4. Lisa Brice

After Embah (2018) sold for $6.87m at Sotheby's London last March. The painting flew past its high estimate to beat Brice's previous auction record by $3.7m.

5. Remedios Varo

Varo's Revelación (also titled El relojero) (1955) sold for $6.22m at Christie's New York in May. The sale narrowly beat the Spanish-Mexican surrealist artist’s previous auction record by $34,200.

6. Simone Leigh

Simone Leigh's bronze, Sentinel IV (2020), sold for $5.74m, at Christie's in New York in May. Number three from an edition of three plus two artist's proofs, it beat the US artist’s previous auction record by $2.65m, a 85% rise.

7. Paula Rego

Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney's Fantasia (1995) sold for $4.62m at Christie's London in October. The sale beat Rego's previous auction record by $887,000, set by another of the artist’s Disney-inspired works.

8. Dorothea Tanning

It was a double record year for the surrealist and artistic partner of Max Ernst. Tanning's Interior with Sudden Joy (1951) sold for $3.4m, at Sotheby's New York in November and in May her 1944 painting Endgame sold for a record $2.35m at Christie's New York.

9. Sophie Taueber-Arp

The artist's radical 1936 abstract, Relief rond en quatre hauteurs, éléments courbes, coupant(s), cassant(s), sold for $3.34m at Christie's Paris in April. Long overshadowed by her husband, Hans (Jean) Arp, the sale beat Tauerber-Arp's previous auction record by $1.93m.

10. Olga de Amaral

Pueblo H (2011) sold for $3.12m at Christie's in New York in November. The sale beat the Colombian textile artist’s previous auction record, which had already been broken in 2025 when de Amaral's Imagen perdida 27 (1996) sold for $1.17m at Phillips in May.