[imagesource: Pyong Sumaria]

Sacha Jafri set out to create The Journey of Humanity (2020), with the intent to use it to raise money for charity.

His initial plan was to secure a Guinness World Record for the world’s largest painting on canvas, which he did last year, and then divide it up into 60 sections that would be auctioned off.

He had his sights set on $30 million, which would be distributed between Dubai Cares, Unicef, UNESCO, and the Global Gift Foundation.

The work, according to ARTnews, ultimately sold as one piece, for the stunning sum of $62 million (around R920 million), placing it among some of the most expensive artworks by a living artist.

It’s not too far behind Beeple’s digital artwork, an NFT that recently sold for $69 million on auction.

It’s almost impossible to capture the scale of the painting in a picture, so we’ve included a few videos so that you can get a feel for it. They also provide some background on the project and a breakdown of his process.

Here’s one posted by Jafri in February this year:

Here he is explaining his process before he completed the work:

And, a video ahead of the auction, which includes a timelapse of Jafri painting the work at the 2-minute mark:

There’s a lot going on there.

Per Apollo, the 17,000-square-foot painting took eight months of 20-hour days, and a few physical injuries to complete. Jafri ended up needing an emergency operation on his spine due to an injury sustained in this process.

He says he was “in a trance” and “didn’t realise the damage I was doing to my body”.

Prior to completing the artwork, he told CNN that he was stuck in Dubai and wanted to create something “poignant”, that would “mean something”, and help those suffering during the pandemic.

He wanted to help the “children of the world with education, connectivity, health and sanitation”:

“I asked the children of the world to send in their artworks – how they feel now, their emotions,” Jafri said.

“We, as adults, are finding this hard. We found the last five months very difficult, very confusing, very frustrating and quite scary. But imagine how a 4-year-old child feels.”

The painting was sold to Andre Abdoune, chief executive of Altius Gestion International Holding.

It’s quite spectacular, but you’d have a tough time finding a wall big enough to display it.

[sources:artnews&apollo&cnn]