NEW YORK, NY.- For the first time in history, women artists will outnumber their male counterparts in a Sotheby’s Evening Sale. Almost 60% of the works on offer in this season’s The Now Evening Auction have been created by women, a 55% increase on the equivalent sale last November. The auction, which celebrates the very best artists working today, even opens with ten consecutive lots by women – a clear signal of the desirability: the opening sequence in any sale generally reserved for works guaranteed to excite the market.

Women artists have been recently making their presence felt ever more strongly at auction: last year Sotheby’s Mei Moses Index found that over the previous five years, prices for female artists had grown by 32%, outpacing growth for male artists by 29%. The Index also found that the growth for Contemporary female artists over that period had grown by a staggering 66%, versus 17% for male artists.

The Now sale follows on the heels of strong prices for women artists seen in Sotheby's salerooms around the world over recent weeks. Just last night at Sotheby's New York, Leonora Carrington's The Garden of Paracelsus soared to a record $3.3 million, while a 1940 tour-de-force by Kay Sage sold for an estimate defying $1 million. In a similar vein, just last month at Sotheby's major Hong Kong auctions, Spider IV by Louise Bourgeois achieved $16.5 million, establishing it as the most valuable sculpture ever sold in Asia. The distinction was also evident at the Venice Biennale this year where women undoubtedly took center stage – accounting for more than 90% of the exhibits.

Artists to Watch during The Now Evening Auction, 19 May:

• Hot off the heels of her Golden Lion Award at this year’s Venice Biennale, Simone Leigh, is poised to make her Sotheby's evening auction debut with ‘Birmingham’.

• Christina Quarles, the focus a critically acclaimed exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2021, and whose works are housed in collections such as Centre Pompidou in Paris, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Hirschhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. and Tate Modern in London.

• Lucy Bull will appear at auction for the first time while Jennifer Packer will make her evening auction debut with one of her largest paintings to date.

• Anna Weyant, whose record was set last week at $1.5m, smashing the $513,840 record price achieved just 13 days before.

• Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, a British artist and writer acclaimed for her enigmatic portraits of fictitious people and recently the subject of a major retrospective at Tate in London.

• The youngest artist to be represented by Hauser & Wirth, Avery Singer will be represented by large-scale work Happening (2014) which featured prominently in the artist’s 2014-2015 solo exhibition held at Kunsthalle Zürich.

• Shara Hughes, whose contemporary take on traditional landscape painting has led to her stratospheric rise since 2017. Hughes has recently been the subject of retrospectives at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, and her work is held many significant collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

“This year, a Sotheby’s evening sale will open with ten lots by women artists – a discrete but powerful testimony to their status as some of the most admired and sought-after creators in today’s market." – Lucius Elliott, Head of The Now Evening Auction, Sotheby’s