Andy Warhol’s first self-portrait sold in a London auction for $7.7 million Wednesday.
The artwork was sold in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction, which included work from other artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Richard Prince.
The Warhol piece, aptly titled Self Portrait, was expected to fetch between $6.4 million and $9 million, according to a release from Sotheby’s. It was taken in a dime store photo-booth in 1963 or 1964, and is thought to be Warhol’s first self-portrait.
“In the age of Instagram, Warhol’s fabled prediction that ‘in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes’ has never felt more prophetic, and the artist’s first self-portraits—created using a strip of photographs taken in a New York dime store photo-booth—have never felt more relevant to contemporary culture,” Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Senior Specialist James Sevier said in a release. “This is a work of immense art historical importance that marks the watershed moment when Warhol joined the canon of the greatest self-portraitists.”
Warhol went on to create other self-portraits including Self-Portrait with Skull and his Fright Wig series.
The Sotheby’s auction yielded nearly $80 million in sales altogether.
