With rising wealth, more women are shaking up the art market

by Kathryn Tully

Roselyn Mathews, chief of staff at Lucifer Lighting Co., in San Antonio, first saw paintings by multidisciplinary artist Floria González at JO-HS gallery in Mexico City last year. “Her work is so vibrant, expressive, and there’s so much emotion,” says Mathews.

When JO-HS showed works by González again this year, Mathews, 33, bought a green-hued painting called It’s not Sunday, but it’s Gloomy 2024 almost immediately. (She declined to say for how much.) “I saw the digital catalog, and I was so taken with it. Then my godsister [art adviser Illa Gaunt] posted the same work on Instagram. I thought, ‘There’s some weird synergy going on.’”

Among collectors, young women like Mathews are exerting more influence in the art market than ever before, according to the 2025 Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting.

The report, which surveyed 3,100 high-net-worth collectors in 10 global markets, found that although Generation X and baby boomer men spent the most on art in their age groups, Generation Z and millennial women outspent their male peers. Millennial women spent an average of $643,700 on fine art, decorative art and antiques in 2024, per the report, while millennial men spent an average of $395,530. Gen Z women outspent Gen Z men by an even greater margin: $537,400 versus $193,810.

These young women also have different priorities when collecting. The survey found that compared with men, women bought more work by unknown artists, spent more on work by women and owned more art by women, with works by women making up 49% of women’s art collections, on average, compared with 40% of men’s.

These buying trends will likely accelerate, according to the report, as more of the estimated $83 trillion of wealth passing from baby boomers globally to their spouses and younger heirs in the coming decades will go to women. Of course, this is just one report on collectors, and the first that has detected greater spending by younger women. More research will be needed to support its findings. 

Mathews, who also discovers artists at residencies, at fairs and on Instagram, has always been immersed in art. Her father, Gilbert Mathews, who founded Lucifer Lighting, and her mother, Suzanne Mathews, are longstanding collectors. Mathews herself has a master’s degree from Sotheby’s Institute of Art. But she says her female friends are also becoming more interested in buying artwork. “That wasn’t the case a few years ago,” she says. “There’s been a shift.”

Despite concerted efforts in recent years by museums, biennials and major private galleries to exhibit more female artists, the representation of women in the art market, and the price of their work, still lags behind their male peers’. Could the buying power and habits of younger women help change that?

The Art Basel & UBS survey found that Gen Z women allocated 48% of their spending to female artists in 2024 and the first half of 2025, the highest percentage of any age group, while Gen Z men spent 42% on female artists on average. Millennial women devoted 47% of spending to female artists, compared with 42% of men. 

Former Yahoo executive and philanthropist Komal Shah, 55, has collected around 300 works by modern and contemporary female artists with her husband, Gaurav Garg, and says young women often tell her they are building collections that include an equal, or even greater, number of works by female artists.

Shah founded the Making Their Mark Foundation, formerly called the Shah Garg Foundation, to highlight achievements by women artists in 2023. After falling for large abstract paintings by Laura Owens and Jacqueline Humphries at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Shah decided her own collection should champion women artists by focusing on them exclusively. “I realized how the odds were so stacked against women artists, in terms of perception and recognition, and because they had to work so much harder.”

Spending by younger collectors may already be boosting sales for female artists at fairs and galleries. According to the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2025, female artists accounted for 46% of representation and 42% of sales at galleries in the primary market, where art is bought for the first time, in 2024, with sales up from 39% in 2023. In 2018, the report found women made up only 36% of artists represented at these galleries and 32% of sales.

But the auction market is where art masterpieces are often resold, sales information is public and benchmark prices that influence other buyers and sellers are set. Helena Newman, Sotheby’s chair of impressionist and modern art, thinks younger female collectors will inevitably start influencing the top end of this market, given the generational wealth transfer underway.

That’s significant, because art by women appears at auction much less frequently, and sells for far less, than art by men. It took 11 years for a woman to set a new auction record, when Frida Kahlo’s El sueño (La cama) sold for $54.7 million at Sotheby’s in November, a record held since 2014 by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, which sold for $44.4 million at the time.

The record-breaking sale of Kahlo’s work “shows that there’s still a massive gender gap, because we also just sold a Gustav Klimt [Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer] for $236.4 million,” says Newman, adding that this gap exists even though men and women buying at auction seek top works by women in equal measure.

Only 11 of the 500 most expensive works sold at auction from 2015 to 2025 were by women — the work of just six artists: Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell, Leonora Carrington, Georgia O'Keeffe and Tamara de Lempicka — according to data provided to Bloomberg by online marketplace Art.sy Inc. The most expensive work by a woman, Kahlo’s El sueño (La cama), ranks 70th on that list.

There are some promising signs for the profile and prices of for women’s work in the auction market. Works by more than 400 artists, representing more than 100 nationalities, appeared at auction in 2024 and 2025, according to Casey Lesser, Art.sy’s chief curator. “It’s a global pool,” she says. Newman points to recent auction records set for contemporary artists such as Cecily Brown and the late surrealists Dorothea Tanning and Leonor Fini. “We’ve seen a steady increase in women artists appearing at auction, both historic and present, and fetching new high prices,” she says.

In November, the New York Times reported that Christie’s sold Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait Me and My Parrots in a private transaction in 2021 for more than $100 million. Art adviser Megan Fox Kelly says it’s not unusual for masterpieces by women to fetch more through private sales, but can one sell for $100 million at auction? “I do think it’s a possibility, and I think a Kahlo could absolutely make that price,” says Newman, citing the huge institutional and private demand for Kahlo’s work, which is mostly in museums or in Mexico, where the export of her art is banned.

Shah says the profiles and prices of artwork by women need to be elevated in both the primary and secondary (resale) market. While she’s encouraged by the enthusiasm of young female collectors, she says the whole art ecosystem still needs to step up. “More great shows by women will lead more people to think about works by women,” Shah says. “Curators, museum directors, collectors — everybody has a big role to play.”

Copyright Bloomberg News