The record is held by Oskar Kokoschka’s painting The Frog from 1968, which was sold in 2016 for 37.7 million crowns. The most expensive Toyen work sold at a domestic auction remains the painting Circus, for which the new owner paid the final price of 79.56 million crowns last year.

The central motif of the painting Mirage is a ghostly beast, whose significantly illuminated face stares at the viewer. Behind the feline there is a motif of a predator, and Toyen also plays into the picture with two cast shadows of female figures in skirts falling on them from the sides.

“The collectible Toyen oil has remained in a private collection for a long time and has so far escaped greater public attention. According to the auction organizers, this is one of Toyen’s most important oils from her post-war period. It was auctioned for the first time,” said Kateřina Sokolová from the organizing auction house Adolf Loos Apartment and Gallery.

Circus by Toyen is in third place in the ranking of the most expensive paintings sold at auctions in the Czech Republic, led by Bohumila Kubišta’s Old Prague motif from 1911. At the end of May, it was sold at an auction in Prague for 123.6 million crowns, including a 20 percent auction markup. He thus created a new domestic auction record, previously held by the painting Divertimento II by František Kupka, which was sold in 2020 for 90.24 million crowns.

There is traditionally great interest in Toyen’s works among fine art collectors. For example, in May of this year, her painting The Recluse from 1934 was sold at auction for 54 million crowns, including mark-up.

Toyen (1902 to 1980), real name Marie Čermínová, is, according to experts, one of the most remarkable personalities of Czech and European visual arts of the 20th century. Between 1925 and 1929, she worked in Paris, where, together with Jindřich Štyrský, she developed the original Czech painting direction – artificialism, which represented a unique and poetic alternative to the geometric abstraction and surrealism of the time. Toyen finally returned to the metropolis above the Seine in 1947 and remained loyal to the surrealist movement. In her work she also reflected on war disasters, the theme of eroticism pervades her entire work.