David Bowie painting found at donation center sells for $88K at auction

Fame: What’s your name? An unidentified buyer isn’t telling, but that person won a painting by rock icon David Bowie for almost $88,000 in an online art auction.

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The 1997 painting, called “DHead XLVI,” was originally bought at an Ontario landfill donation center for $5 (Canadian). It sold for $108,120 in Canadian currency, or nearly $88,000 in American dollars, CNN reported.

The painting is part of a series of approximately 47 “Dead Head” works created by Bowie between 1995 and 1997, according to Rob Cowley, president of Cowley Abbott, the Toronto-based auction house that handled the sale.

The “Dead Head” series depicts band members, friends and Bowie himself, The Globe and Mail reported.

According to the auction house, the consignor bought the Bowie for $4.09 ($5 Canadian) last summer after finding it in a pile of second-hand items at the Macher Mall near North Bay, Ontario, according to CTV News.

“The sale marks a new global auction record for a work by David Bowie, more than doubling the 2016 sale of a D Head series artwork for £22,500 (approximately $39,000 Canadian) in the United Kingdom,” Cowley Abbott said in a news release. “Within the first few days, it already set a new record. It continued to garner bids that spiked during the final hours of the auction, drawing ... almost 50 bids from across Canada and as far as Australia.”

The painting has Bowie’s signature on the back of the 9.75 x 8-inch canvas, along with a tag that contains his name and the date the painting was created, CNN reported.

“It’s a phenomenon we call the ‘Hollywood effect,’ when there is a famous name attached, or when there is an extraordinary set of circumstances such as rarity or human-interest story behind the artwork,” Rob Cowley said in a statement.

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