Christie's London evening auction of Post-war and Contemporary Art realized a total of 81.7 million pounds (about 126.6 million U.S. dollars).

The top price of the evening was paid for Jean-Michel Basquiat's Museum Security, which was sold for 9.3 million pounds. The large painting encapsulated the artist's downtown graffiti style and vocabulary that marks the best works in his oeuvre.

Basquiat, an American artist who started as a graffiti artist in New York, was known as a Neo-expressionist and Primitivist painter in the 1980s. He died in 1988 of heroin overdose at the age of 27.

The market for Basquiat's works has grown significantly over the past five years. Between 2011 and 2012, world record price for him at auction was broken three times.

Peter Doig's the Architect's Home in the Ravine was sold for nearly 7.7 million pounds, setting a new world record price for the artist at auction. Closely covered with snow-laden trees, the painting recreated Canadian architect Eberhard Zeidler's modernist home at the heart of the Toronto ravine.

Doig is a Scottish artist. His paintings are landscapes with many in recollection of the snowy scenes of his childhood in Canada. In 2007, his painting White Canoe sold at Sotheby's for 11.3 million dollars, then an auction record for a living European artist.

Another notable lot at the auction was Damien Hirst's Away from the Flock, sold for 1.9 million pounds. It was a single sheep suspended within two tanks from the artist's natural history series. Death is the central theme in works of Hirst, who made a series of artworks in which dead animals like shark, pig and cow were dissected and preserved.

Francis Outred, international director of Christie's Europe and head of Post-war and Contemporary art, was satisfied with the result. "The thirst for post-war and contemporary art continues to develop," he said. Endi

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