4. Bridget Riley
In 1968 the artist would represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale where she scooped up the international prize for painting, and was the first woman and the first contemporary British painter to win the prize. Chant 2 (1967), a painting of alternating vertical blue and white stripes, which was part of three works that went to the Biennale, was purchased by an American collector in 2008 at Sotheby’s London for $5.1 million or £3.2 million, outdoing the artist’s own record, set only a few months earlier, by a couple of million. In 2006 Riley’s work was already attracting renewed collector interest, as indicated by the sale to Jeffrey Deitch of Untitled (Diagonal Curve)(1966) for $2.2 million or £1.4 million, roughly four times its low estimate.