Auction in progress at Sotheby’s contemporary art sale at Katara.
DOHA: Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Doha Sale established the highest price for an auction of Contemporary Art in the Middle East region achieving a total of $15,199,750 and selling 89.1 percent by lot during Tuesday’s sale at Katara.
Records were set for nine artists, including a record for a living Arab artist. The top lot of the sale was Donald Judd’s Untitled (Bernstein 90-01), which sold – after an extended bidding battle among four people – for $3,525,000.
Robin Woodhead, Chairman of Sotheby’s International, said the auction demonstrated Qatar’s central role as a cultural hub of the entire Mena region.
“Sotheby’s ability to attract bidding from collectors from 15 countries across four continents here this evening affirms the growing importance of Qatar in the international art world,” he said.
“We are thrilled with the results of this evening’s sale, which achieved records for nine artists and set the highest total for a sale of Contemporary Art in the Middle East region. It is extraordinarily gratifying to see the market’s response to the exceptional range of art we sourced for this evening’s carefully curated auction,” said Lina Lazaar Jameel, Head of Sale and Sotheby’s International Contemporary Art Specialist.
The cover lot for the sale, Rising Down, set an auction record for Ethiopian-born artist Julie Mehretu titled when it achieved the strong price of $3,077,000, over its high estimate of $3m.
Chant Avedissian’s Icons of the Nile set a record for a living Arab artist when it fetched $1,565,000 (estimate $1m-$1.5m).
Created in 2010, this gouache, stencil and acrylic paint on cardboard, in one hundred and twenty parts, is the largest piece the artist has created to date. It presents a mosaic of Egyptian culture that retraces the country’s past through nostalgic imagery and iconographical motifs.
‘Suspended Together’ fetched the remarkable sum of $329,000 (estimate $100,000-150,000), achieving an auction record for the artist.
Magnificent in scale and epic in conception, ‘Suspended Together’ is one of the most important and celebrated works of Manal Al Dowayan’s career to date and the first of her installation works to appear at an auction.
A myriad of snow white porcelain doves hover in the air, the wings and body of each bird stamped with an exact reproduction of the permission document a Saudi woman needs from their male guardian to travel.
Ya’illahi (Dear Lord), one of the most important paintings ever to come to an auction by Ayman Baalbaki, achieved a record for the artist when it reached a final sum of $377,000. Depicting the shrouded face of a lone, heroic figure gazing up to the skies, the powerfully charged work explores the acute tension and ambiguity within the kaffiyeh, an everyday garment. The Peninsula
