JAMM’S 3rd annual auction ropes in $570K

Kuwaiti, int’l contemporary artists participate

KUWAIT CITY, Nov 30: A glamorous international crowd of art connoisseurs and enthusiasts attended JAMM’s third annual Auction of contemporary Arab, Iranian and International Art in Kuwait Thursday night at the Contemporary Art Platform which roped in five hundred and seventy thousand dollars ($570,000) in total sales including the premium.

In a sign of the Middle East’s growing stature as a hub for modern art paintings, art connoisseurs and enthusiasts came from across the globe in pursuit of the best pieces of art by Arab, Iranian and international artists at the auction conducted by Alexander Gilkes, a New York based former global marketing director and auctioneer for Phillips de Pury and co-founder of Paddle8.

The event was a wonderful opportunity for the art world to see the best of the best in terms art works of the top contemporary artists from Kuwait, the Middle East and beyond.

The highlights of the 62-piece art auction included Iranian artist Farideh Lashai’s “El Amal” that sold for $72,000. The second highest lot, also by an Iranian Reza Derakshani’s 2011 executed “Garden Party” piece, a large 182 x 304 cm oil painting in vibrant shades of red and pink went for $70,000 while the third highest selling piece titled “Mashrabia Cabana” by Swiss Artist Andre’ Meyerhans got sold for $50,000. There were also bidders who registered to bid online via the Paddle8 website as well as those who preferred to bid by telephone.

Works of art by artists such as, Reza Derakshani, Andre’ Mayerhans, Farideh Lashai, Amira Behbehani, Rachel Lee Harnanian, Damian Aquiles, Bert Stern, Shiva Ahmadi, Alfred Tarazi, Zhou Wendou, Jamal Abdel Rahim, Mahmoud Bakshi Moakhtar, Abdel Kadiri, Shahriar Ahmadi, Jowhara Al Saud, Hamza Bounoua, Faisal Samra, Nermin Hammam, Sami Al Turki, Michel Haddi, Yousef Nabil, Shurooq Amin, Leila Pazooki, Al Braithwaite, Lalla Essaydi, Sueraya Shaheen, Ebrahim Habib, Salem Ahmadian, Mohammed Rahimi, Ibrahim Al-Atiya were auctioned off to pro-vide an opportunity for both new and existing clients in the GCC region and beyond, to add to their collections of contemporary art.

The rest of the artists whose works went under the hammer were Ghada Kandari, Fatima Al Marzoui, Golnaz Fathi, Ahmed Abu Al-Adas, Chaza Charafeddine, Shahzad Changalvaee, Mohammed Sami, Aziz Al Mudhaf, Simeen Farhat, Alireza Masoumi, Walid Siti, Fadia Haddad, Sajjad Ahmed, Suhaila Al Najdi, Mohammed AlShemmari, Adnan Mentek, Fadil Al Abbar, Takashi Murakami, Nasser Azizi, Ahmed Al-Ayoub, Hameed Khazaal, Mohammed Ramadan, Daryoush Gharahzad, Omar Fakhoury, Reda Salem, Navid Azimi Sajjadi and Mahsa Karimi.

Kuwaiti artist Amira Behbehani’s recent oil painting “Study of Francis Bacon” (Men in Blue) which sold for $9,000, is a piece of work on blue canvas that seeks to engage a debate on the political and religious views of wearing the Abayya. There were twelve Kuwaiti artists whose works went under the hammer.

Among the Iranian artists was Shiva Ahmadi, whose “Brown Veil” 2011 painting, a mixed media work on aquabord, was sold for $13,000. Golnaz Fathi’s 2008 untitled piece, a diptych masterfully combining Arabic calligraphy and strong brushstrokes of red and black went for $4,200. Shahrzad Changalvaee’s 2010 photographs “Body#1, Motherland#4 and Me#1” was sold for $8,200. The artist had the three words made from Plexiglas, put LED lights inside and took these pictures in the twilight with the lit up words defining and spotlighting people.

Sold

The three wall-mounted sculptures and suspended installations by Pakistani artist Simeen Farhat which aimed to translate the dynamism of Rumi’s poems into visual energy, titled “Twisted Melody”, 2010, “Intent”, 2011, and “Red Spill”, 2012, sold for $11,500, $8,500 and $10,000 respectively.

International artists included Rachel Lee Hovnanian whose large-format photograph “Fake Flowers, Living Room”, 2012, sold for $10,000. A unique print of Bert Stern’s “Marilyn in Red Scarf”, 2012, a photograph of Marilyn Monroe from the famous “Last Sitting” with hand-applied jewels was sold for $16,000.

Swiss architect and designer André Meyerhans who is said to blur the boundaries between art, design and architecture, had his 2011 piece “Mashrabia Cabana”, a 4 x 4 x 4 meter cabana inspired by traditional mashrabiyas, go for $50,000 after a painstakingly slow bidding and counter bid- ding process in incremental jumps of $500.

Aside the few instances when bidding was in $100 and $200 incremental jumps, bidding for many of the art works was so competitive bidders had to outmaneuver each other with incremental jumps as high as $3,000-$5,000 especially for works like Farida Lashai’s “El Amal”, Reza Derakshani’s “Garden Party” and Andre’ Mayerhans’ “Mashrabia Cabana”. That actually got the audience applauding sometimes and keeping the galleries lively through the long 62-piece auction event.

Focusing

Gilkes, co-founder of Paddle8, a fully virtual art auction house focusing on fine art, spoke to the Arab Times at the shutter of the auction hammer, stating that JAMM through the auction did an incredible job of raising awareness on contemporary art and its many merits and as a medium of expression in the Middle East and particularly Kuwait.

He added that “the success of the auction showed a continued interest in collecting art and the roles played by many of the families in Qatar, Dubai, Sharjah and Kuwait who show an increased interest in collecting and the expression that art allows”.

Sheikha Lulu Al Sabah, JAMM founder and art journalist and connoisseur in her own right, commenting after the sale said, “We could not have asked for a better result. We are thrilled and would like to thank all the bidders, local and international as well as our sponsors and supporters who all in diverse ways helped to make this happen.”

The success of the event, for Sheikha Al Sabah, is one positive step forward towards her life-long dream of nurturing Middle Eastern artists into the mainstream of art, thus fulfilling one of the main objectives of JAMM of creating cultural projects devoid of geographical boundaries.

The JAMM auction, a memorable evening in the social art calendar of Kuwait was sponsored exclusively by TAG Heuer which has been pioneering Swiss watchmaking for over 150 years, bringing to the industry some of its main innovations. TAG Heuer is today the only brand to master high frequencies with high precision and automatic watches able to display 1/1000th and 1/5000th of a second. This avant-garde is at the heart of TAG Heuer in all its aspects. And helping to promote contemporary artists, who are at the avantgarde of their art, is for JAMM a natural involvement.