A CLASH OF STYLES AS OLD RUBS SHOULDERS WITH NEW
A series of auctions is capitalising on the energy generated by Art Dubai, writes Melissa Gronlund
This week is Art Week across the UAE, with exhibitions opening at the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Barjeel Art Foundation, the galleries in Alserkal Avenue and at Warehouse421, and, of course, with Art Dubai, the event that all the activity is pegged to, opening on Wednesday.
The two major auction houses are in on the action, with Christie’s planning PostWar and Contemporary sales in Dubai on Thursday, and Sotheby’s bringing highlights from a forthcoming Middle East sale for the public – and potential collectors – to view at their space in DIFC from tomorrow.
For the first time, Sotheby’s is showing highlights from its Old Masters sale, with Rubens’ Portrait of a Bearded Venetian Nobleman, Bust Length (1620s) – with an estimate of £3 million (Dh15.4m) – coming to the UAE for the first time. “Rubens is the great communicator,” says George Gordon, Old Master paintings specialist for Sotheby’s, noting the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi last November has helped shape the image of the UAE as a place receptive to more period European works.
In fact, Old Masters have become of interest to a wider collecting public across the board. “We’ve seen Old Master collecting move away from [such] categorisations – which were all artificial,” Gordon says. With fairs for Old Master works such as Frieze Masters in London, and increased emphasis on Modern sides of fairs such as Art Dubai’s – which began a Modern talks programme last year – collectors are now showing a willingness to collect across different mediums and time periods. Rubens’s portrait is travelling on Hong Kong, where its showing will coincide with the fair there, Art Basel Hong Kong, and it will be auctioned in early July at the Sotheby’s Old Masters Sale in London.
Hala Khayat, Middle East specialist at Christie’s, says that in Dubai, more Westerners are buying up Arab works.
“It’s almost 50-50 of international interest in our sale versus 50 per cent region and local interest,” she says of Christie’s Middle East sales. “It’s no longer dictated by nationality and patriotic collecting.”
The Christie’s sale, which is on the small side, includes an example of one such patriotic collection: that of Fadhil Chalabi, the Iraqi businessman who bought many of the major artists in the Iraqi modern movement, with whom he became close friends – such as Dia Azzawi and Shakir Hassan Al Said, whose works are included in this sale. Christie’s also offers works by contemporary artists such as Timo Nasseri, whose show has been recently extended at Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah, and Rokni Haerizadeh, the Iranian artist who is based in Dubai.
The Sotheby’s Middle East sale, which will take place in London in April, includes a 1937 work by Mahmoud Said, a rare painting of a Biblical subject. Ashkan Baghestan, who put together the sale, says
Adam and Eve is exquisite: “You have everything you want from a Said painting: the Nile landscape, the lush colours, the celebration of Egypt.” It carries an estimate of between £300,000 and £500,000.
The arresting, almost viscerally frightening painting
It is the time to just explore art, to take your children – and we happen to also be part of this HALA KHAYAT Christie’s
The Minotaur Scares the Good
People (1966) by the Iranian-Italian artist Bahman Mohasses is compared by Baghestan to another Rubens work, the
Massacre of the Innocents from around 1610, and shows, in full length, Mohasses’s favourite mythological character of the Minotaur, who populates a number of his paintings. The work will be on view at Sotheby’s DIFC from tomorrow before it goes under the hammer in April with an estimate of between £280,000 and £350,000.
There is much overlap in the sales: both include work by Azzawi, Al Said, Paul Guiragossian – also the subject of a current Sharjah show, the last at the Barjeel Art Foundation’s present spaces – and both by Fahrelnissa Zeid, an established artist who had a major retrospective last year at Tate Modern. And in some ways, the sales reflect a solidity: the likes of the above are established names at auction, and their high-calibre works largely evade market trends. The market itself has stablised from the uncertainty of a few years ago, although the Middle East continues to face problems such as counterfeiting and untraceable works.
But the auction activity and the way the houses have worked to be part of this week underscore the excitement and the amount of art events happening across the UAE.
“You don’t find it in any other Arab city or in any other place in the whole Middle East,” Khayat says. “It is the time to just explore art, to take your children – and we happen to also be part of this. We’re very lucky to witness this awakening.”