World’s Largest Canvas Painting Sells For US$62 Million At Auction
Image via Atlantis, The Palm, Dubai
Many are spinning their spare time at home into something more productive. As for British visual artist Sacha Jafri, he has created a full painting the size of two soccer fields—and that artwork, The Journey of Humanity (2020), has sold for US$62 million at a charity auction in the Atlantis, The Palm hotel in Dubai.
The piece was sold as a whole on Tuesday, placing it among the priciest artworks from a living artist to be auctioned. It trails after Beeple’s JPG, which sold for the cryptocurrency equivalent of US$69 million. At an impressive 17,000 square feet, is also the largest art canvas yet, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
It would take 300 layers of paint and several months to complete the project. Jafri drew upon the isolation faced by children around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic for the painting, and pondered if it could be turned into an opportunity to unite young voices everywhere.
Drawings, paintings, and collages representing isolation and connection in the eyes of “tens of millions of children” were collected to memorialize this hopeful time in history. The goal was to “paint the world a different color.”
The original plan was to split the painting up into 60 panels to be showcased in four auctions. However, it ended up being sold as one to Andre Abdoune, chief executive of Altius Gestion International Holding, The National reports. The hotel says that funds raised from this sale will be donated to Dubai Cares and its nonprofit partners, UNICEF, UNESCO, and The Global Gift Foundation, to support “their drive to create globalized access to connectivity to ensure continual uninterrupted education for the most in-need children of the world.”
While press outlets have dubbed The Journey of Humanity as the “world’s largest painting,” it is more accurately the largest to be on a canvas. The current record holder for the largest painting is Taiwanese artist Hung Chi-Sung’s masterpiece of Buddha, which stretches for 130,099 square feet.
Atlantis, The Palm hotel likens the painting to a “Modern-Day Sistine Chapel” and considers it to be the “largest worldwide social, artistic and philanthropic initiative in history.”
[via ARTnews and Atlantis, The Palm, Dubai, cover image via Atlantis, The Palm, Dubai]
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