British artist Tracey Emin's controversial 'My Bed' artwork which features an unmade bed and a littered floor including empty vodka bottles and discarded condoms has fetched a whopping 2.54 million pounds, almost double its pre-sale estimate.
Christie's said the 1998 artwork was bought by an anonymous bidder yesterday for 2,546,500 pounds (USD 4.4 million) and the price set a world record for the Margate artist at auction.
The work had been put up for sale by millionaire art collector Charles Saatchi, with a guide price of between 800,000 pounds and 1.2 million pounds.
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Saatchi, who paid 150,000 pounds in 2000 for My Bed, one of the key works of the Young British Artist movement, sold it to support the work of the Saatchi Gallery Foundation.
Emin, 50, grinned as she left the auction after her piece was sold.
Emin calls her artwork "My Bed," because it was the bed where she spend four days in 1998 "heartbroken and feeling terrible" she said.
Once Emin got out of the bed she recalls looking at the mess left behind and decided to make it art.
"Suddenly I had this vision of taking it out of the bedroom space and putting it into a white gallery space," she said. "It suddenly made sense," she said. "Wow this is fantastic artwork," she told CNN.
"It's like a piece of history, a time capsule," Emin said.
Jussi Pylkkanen, the auctioneer and president of Christie's Europe, said: "Tracey is very, very happy.
"I just called her to see how she felt about things and she said she was absolutely delighted," The Telegraph quoted Pylkkanen as saying.
"People wondered why she was so engaged in the process of selling that object but for her that was her biography, that was a statement, that was a self portrait," Pylkkanen said.
Francis Outred, head of post war contemporary art for the auctioneers, said the "iconic work of British art from the 1990s" quadrupled her previous world record, achieving 2.546 million pounds. Her previous best was 481,000 pounds.
