Christie’s will hold its first fine art auction in Abu Dhabi on November 1, offering more than 70 works of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art at the Abu Dhabi Edition hotel. The sale, titled Mawasim: 20 Years of Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art, marks two decades since the auction house staged its first UAE sale in Dubai in 2006.
The lots cover six decades and include artists from across the Arab world as well as Iran and Turkey, with works drawn from collections including Beirut’s Dalloul Collection and Sharjah’s Barjeel Art Foundation. Fahrelnissa Zeid’s Composition, painted in 1948 and 1949, is among the most valuable, with an estimate of $500,000 to $700,000. Its fields of blue, red, yellow and orange, split by dark lines, show the artist moving towards the abstraction that built her international reputation, and the canvas hung in her studio at the Iraqi Embassy in London while her husband, Prince Zeid Al-Hussein, was Iraq’s ambassador to Britain. Mahmoud Said’s Portrait de Princesse Fadia, from 1952, carries an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000. The sitter was the youngest daughter of King Farouk I and Queen Farida of Egypt, and Said was her great-uncle. He completed the portrait months before the monarchy ended and gave it to Queen Farida, after which it passed to Fadia and remained in the family. Paul Guiragossian’s Noces, almost 2.4 metres wide and estimated at $300,000 to $500,000, shows a seated bride surrounded by musicians, dancers and guests, one of them a blind musician modelled on the artist’s father. This year marks the centenary of Guiragossian’s birth.
Gulf artists also feature. Ahmed Mater’s Golden Hour, a 2011 photograph from his Desert of Pharan project, places the Kaaba and pilgrims performing tawaf amid cranes and new construction in Makkah. Christie’s is offering the artist’s proof from an edition of four, estimated at $80,000 to $120,000. Hassan Sharif’s 2008 painting Press Conference No 2, a satirical image of a distorted public speaker by the former Akhbar Dubai cartoonist who became a central figure in UAE conceptual art, is estimated at $50,000 to $70,000. Ridha Moumni, Christie’s chairman for the Middle East and Africa, said Sharif would sit alongside younger Emirati artists shaped by his legacy.
The auction opens a crowded period for Abu Dhabi’s art calendar, with the Frieze fair following later in November and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi due to open on December 11. Moumni has said Christie’s wants to be “more present and more visible in the city”.
