Ferelei Báez’s Monumental Canvas Makes Its Auction Debut at Sotheby’s New York
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A sinuous figure writhes across a rigidly ordered map of 1645, her vibrant form consuming the geometric paths that once guided colonial ambition across continents. Ferelei Báez's 'Encyclopedia of gestures (Jeu du monde)' arrives at auction for the first time in November, a monumental canvas that orchestrates a deliberate collision between the authority of cartography and the irrepressible vitality of paint.
Reclaiming complexity through color
The painting draws its visual foundation from Le Jeu du Monde, an eighteenth century board game that positioned Paris as the center of world order according to colonial logic. The game's geometric pathway swept players from the Americas through Africa and Asia toward France, encoding a particular vision of global dominion into leisure and play. Báez enlarges and sets this board as her canvas's backdrop, acknowledging the historical weight of the object whilst dismantling its claims to truth.
Against this rigid framework, she inscribes a figure of extraordinary physical presence. The body moves with sinuous grace, its colours ablaze, refusing the map's orderly geometry. Where the game aspires to reduction and control, Báez restores what cartography erases: the world's stubborn, irreducible complexity, the lives and geographies that resist confinement to squares and paths. The collision between mapped surface and painted gesture becomes the painting's central argument, each register of colour and form testifying to what the colonial vision sought to exclude.
A landmark sale in contemporary practice
That 'Encyclopedia of gestures (Jeu du monde)' had not previously crossed an auction block testifies to its significance within Báez's body of work and to the esteem in which it is held. The painting's scale and ambition mark it as a work of considerable consequence, one that synthesises her intellectual engagement with colonial history, cartography and the body into a single, radiant statement.
The work takes its place in The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction at Sotheby's New York on 16 November, presented in partnership with Céline. The sale gathers works of consequence across contemporary practice, though this painting stands apart both for its scale and for the directness with which it engages questions of representation, power and visual resistance. For collectors attuned to work that operates simultaneously as formal achievement and ethical argument, its appearance represents an opportunity of genuine rarity.
The auction takes place at Sotheby's New York on 16 November 2026. Registration to bid is available through the auction house's official channels.
Key Facts
- Artist: Ferelei Báez
- Work: Encyclopedia of gestures (Jeu du monde)
- Sale: The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction, presented in partnership with Céline
- Auction house and location: Sotheby's New York
- Date: 16 November 2026
- Historical reference: Based on Le Jeu du Monde, a 1645 board game
The Simply Luxury View
This is the first time Báez's monumental work has been offered at auction, marking a significant moment in the artist's institutional recognition and in the market's engagement with contemporary painting that merges formal sophistication with political thought. The painting exemplifies a generation of artists working in large scale figuration, one that refuses the division between visual pleasure and intellectual urgency.
For collectors building seriously in contemporary art, the work's appearance carries weight beyond the individual canvas. It signals the maturation of Báez's practice within the secondary market and the growing acknowledgement that paintings addressing colonialism, cartography and representation belong among the highest priorities of contemporary collecting. The fact of its auction debut, rather than its passage between private holders, suggests institutional conviction about its significance.
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