A Rare David Bowie Self-Portrait — Featuring His Handprints — Is Going on Auction at Sotheby’s

A rare David Bowie self-portrait is going on auction at Sotheby’s, featuring the musician and artist’s own handprints.

The 1996 work is part of eight self-portraits Bowie created during a prolific period of painting, all of which were snapped up immediately. Done on paper, the painting emphasizes Bowie’s signature anisocoria and includes two of his actual handprints pressed directly onto the bottom of the composition — making it arguably the closest to a physical trace of the artist a collector could have.

This particular portrait was gifted by Bowie to his St. Ives gallerist and is now coming to the market for the first time as part of Sotheby’s Modern British and Irish Art Day Auction on Oct. 15. Its price is estimated between £35,000-55,000 ($46,000-72,500). The work is now on public view.

“There’s something incredibly direct and personal about this self-portrait,” Jen Hardie, Sotheby’s director and senior specialist of modern British and Irish art, tells Variety. “Bowie looks straight out at you, and his own handprints appear on the work itself. It’s bold, colorful and unmistakably Bowie, capturing the same restless creativity that ran through everything he did. It also feels particularly special to see a work like this return to Sotheby’s, a decade after our landmark ‘Bowie/Collector’ sale celebrated the extraordinary breadth of his own collection.”

Indeed, “Bowie/Collector” in 2016 sold more than 350 works from Bowie’s private collection, bringing in £32.9 million ($43.4 million) and setting 59 artist records. Bowie was an admirer or German Expressionism, dating back to his years in Berlin in the ’70s, and also of School of London artists Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach — the influences of which can all be seen in his own work.

See Bowie’s full self-portrait below.