A work from Paula Rego's "Balancing Ostriches" series goes up for auction today.

The triptych, with an estimated bid range of between three million and five million pounds (between 3.5 million and 5.8 million euros), will be lot number 20 of 61 paintings and sculptures in the in-person auction dedicated to works by artists from the 20th and 21st centuries, according to the Christie's website.

In 2023, a diptych from the same series 'Balancing Ostriches' (1995) was sold for 3.5 million euros, by the same auction house, becoming 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 the ballerinas dressed in black and pink pointes, up for auction today, is from the same series and thematic cycle, but they are separate and independent pieces within the set that Paula Rego developed inspired by the film 'Fantasia', by Walt Disney.

The scheduled evening auction of 20th/21st century works will also feature works by artists such as Lucian Freud, Picasso, René Magritte, Egon Schielle, Louise Bourgeois, Marc Chagall, Peter Doig, Claude Monet, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Damien Hirst and Gerhard Richter.

The 'Dancing Ostriches' series was previously part of the Saatchi Collection, created for the Hayward Gallery's 1996 exhibition 'Spellbound: Art and Film', and has been exhibited frequently over the past three decades.

It has been exhibited, notably, at Tate Liverpool (1997), in the United Kingdom, at the Musée National Reina Sofia (2007-08), in Madrid, Spain, at the Musée de l'Orangerie, in Paris, France (2018-19), and at the Kestner Gesellschaft, in Hannover, Germany (2022-23).

Born in Lisbon in 1935, 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 later settle and become known for the uniqueness of her work, inspired by literature and marked, over the decades, by the defense of women's rights.

In London she met her husband, the English artist Victor Willing, who died in 1988, whose work Paula Rego showed several times at the Casa das Histórias museum in Cascais.

In 2004, she was awarded the Grand Cross of the Military Order of Sant'Iago da Espada of Portugal by the President of the Republic, Jorge Sampaio, and in 2010, she was appointed Dame Commander of The Order of the British Empire by the British Crown, for her contribution to the arts.

In 2016 he received the medal of honor 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 June 8, 2022, leaving behind a body of work represented in the most important public and private collections around the world.

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