Wealthy art lovers and investors are set to bid for a number of "exceptional" surrealist art works at Sotheby’s London forthcoming Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on Tuesday 5th February 2013.

The sale will include the "strongest array" of surrealist art "ever to be offered at auction", with works from the likes of Joan Miro, Picasso, Monet and Schiele set to go under the hammer on February 5th.

Estimates for the pieces range from £30,000 to £8 million, with Miró's "Femme revant de l'evasion, (1945) expected to fetch one of the highest bids. It is the first time the work has come to the market in almost 60 years while the painting has not been seen in public for over half a century. Miró's "Femme revant de l’evasion" is a large-scale work executed at a time at which the artist was at the height of his international acclaim. The painting depicts the figure of a woman against a light background and uses the vocabulary of signs developed by Miró in his celebrated Constellations series a few years earlier. The large-format image is rendered with a precision and elegance characteristic of Miró’s best works. It is the only work that remains in private hands from an exceptional series of oils produced between late January and late February of 1945.

Joan Miró had close ties to Mallorca throughout his entire life. They were strengthened when he became engaged to a young Mallorcan woman, Pilar Juncosa, in the summer of 1929, whom he married shortly thereafer, on October 12th that same year. In 1954, Miró decided to leave Barcelona and settle permanently in Mallorca: "This is a wonderful place... We are about to buy a house near Palma, on a splendid plot of land.”

Miro lived in Mallorca from 1954 until he died in 1983. From 1956 he painted in his specially designed studio in Cala Major, which today is open to the public.