BY RAYNALD C RIVERA
DOHA: The global art market is seeing increased demand for contemporary works coming from the Middle East, says an international art expert from leading auction house Sotheby’s.
“There is huge demand for contemporary works coming from the Middle East in general. We have had auctions for Middle Eastern art since 2006 and we’ve seen year after year the population and demography of buyers become a lot more varied, from buyers from nine countries to more than 30 countries in each of the sales,” Lina Lazaar Jameel, Sotheby’s International Contemporary Art Specialist, told The Peninsula at the preview of the upcoming Doha auction yesterday in Katara.
“This is quite incredible because it gives you a sense of the depth of the market as well as the level of interest internationally,” she said.
Forty out of 47 contemporary works of art that will go under the hammer at the evening auction on April 22 in Katara are from the Middle East.
This is not the first time Sotheby’s is conducting an auction in Doha. In 2009, the London-based auction house held a sale of contemporary art of Middle Eastern and international artists and followed it up with an auction of calligraphic works the next year. Both were successful, said Jameel.
Sotheby’s has also been coming to Doha with travelling expos every three or four months as Doha has become a major art hub.
“Obviously, Doha is at the forefront of a large cultural movement in the Gulf, that’s why we chose to be here because it is really fundamentally pioneering the cultural and art scene in the wider Middle East, so it makes perfect sense for us to be in Doha today,” explained Jameel.
The public will get the chance to see outstanding examples of painting, installation art, photography and sculpture in an exhibition which opens today, before the works are offered for sale on April 22, at 7pm at Building 5 in Katara.
The auction, which is expected to raise over $11m, features important works of art by leading Arab and Iranian artists as well as international artists.
The most expensive piece in the collection is a Donald Judd stack installation he created in the latter part of his career. Made of black anodized aluminium and Plexiglas, the work is valued between QR9.11m and QR12.75m.
The father of the minimalist movement in the US, Judd believed that “the material, space and colour are the three elements that make a successful work of art.”
“Stack installations are one of Judd’s most well-known body of work. They come in very precise dimensions. Judd moved away from all rules and traditions of what a sculpture should be,” explained Jameel.
Among the modern and contemporary Arab and Iranian art highlights are works by Ayman Baalbaki, Julie Mehretu and Chant Avedissian, while the extremely appealing offering of international contemporary art includes important works by Ai Weiwei and Subodh Gupta, which are richly infused with the cultural heritage of the respective artists.
THE PENINSULA
