Going, going, to go! Sotheby’s offers Middle East art for Spring
- 15 Feb 2023
Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer
This Spring, Sotheby’s will offer over 80 works of art from the pioneering Al Zayani family collection, all of which have been hung alongside each other in their home in Bahrain – combining an impeccable taste with eclecticism.
Based between Bahrain and London, Abdulrahman Al Zayani is one of the leading collectors in the Middle East, together with his family assembling a multitude of artworks from the historic Islamic world to modern and contemporary international art and design.
The artworks hail from Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and North Africa, and the artists in the collection represent the vast artistic production created over the last century in the Middle East.
Works by Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar, Hassan Hajjaj, Fahrelnissa Zeid, Hatem El-Mekki, Mahmoud Moussa, Mohammed Melehi, Fouad Kamel, Gazbia Sirry, Farid Belkahia, Behjat Sadr and Taner Ceylan will go on view to the public, alongside worldwide auction highlights including jewellery, watches and arts of the Islamic world and India.
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Exploring myriad themes and mediums, each work represents a different aesthetic while tying into a rich thread of cultural heritage. “As we open the doors to our collection, the overarching sense is that these pieces were acquired with love, and we are excited for them to go to new homes where they will be discovered and appreciated anew.
“As with all journeys, new pathways must be travelled, and so with this auction we are opening a new chapter of both our story and the story of these timeless artworks. The world of Middle Eastern art has transformed since we first started almost two decades ago, and we are proud to witness and be a part of that evolution, living in a region that is now becoming one of the cultural hubs of the world,” says the Al Zayani Family.
“Bringing together the best of the best from this field – across the breadth of the Middle East – this sale marks a unique opportunity for budding collectors to acquire rare and important works from artistic masters from the region,” says Ashkan Baghestani, Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Specialist.
The Dubai exhibition (Feb. 28 – Mar. 3) will be followed by a display of the collection in its entirety in London from April 21 to 25, ahead of the live auction on April 25 (alongside which will run Sotheby’s bi-annual 20th Century Art/Middle East online sale, closing April 27).
Highlights from the collection include Gazbia Sirry’s The Garden, 1959, which is from the first stage of the artist’s oeuvre, an early ‘coming of age’ painting exploring the different stages in the life of a woman. Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar’s Untitled work (Gratzella’s Portrait) bears witness to a pivotal point between his two main artistic phases: this painting is one of the rare portraits painted by the Egyptian modernist.
Fahrelnissa Zeid’s Erbil: Realites nouvelles, circa 1960-65, is also for view. The title of the painting refers to the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan and translates to ‘new realities’. In bright blues and yellows, Zeid uses her mastery of colour and form here.
Hamed Nada’s Les Chanteuses, 1990, is included in the collection. Born in an ancient district of Cairo in 1924, Nada was part of a group of artists dubbed ‘Contemporary Art Group’, concerned with making art that was truly Egyptian – adapting elements from folk myths, fables and superstitions that had been orally passed on for generations and translating them into a modernist artistic vocabulary.
Ayman Baalbaki’s Mulatham, 2013, hails from his popular series of ‘Mulatham’, portraits of men wearing keffiyeh and staring back at the viewer from various angles and expressions. The keffiyeh, a traditional head covering used for millennia in the Middle East to protect oneself from sand and heat, in recent years has become a potent symbol of Palestinian identity and resistance. In these works, Baalbaki uses the immediately recognisable figure of the Palestinian freedom fighter to explore the theme of cultural symbols – their ambiguity and their power.
Behjat Sadr’s Untitled is also one of the highlights. Sadr developed a style consisting of spontaneous, asymmetrical shapes and contrasting colours applied to large canvases laid out on the floor. This painting is characteristic of her ‘rhythmic years’ of 1968 – 1979, when she focused on the experimental dimension of her work, while absorbing the events unravelling in Iran and Europe.
Fouad Kamel’s Untitled (The Drinker), 1951, is a bow to the artist, one of the founding members of Egypt’s ‘Art and Liberty’ group – an initiative rooted in artistic and political reform. Here, the central figure is at once the sitter and the chair, focusing the attention on the almost empty drinking glass in the centre, which in turn evokes meanings of scarcity and despair.
Sotheby’s is also showing Farid Belkahia’s Untitled composition, 1981. Belkahia was born in 1934 in Marrakech and as an artist, was convinced of the importance of preserving one’s cultural heritage. He developed a whole new iconography bound in Berber and other indigenous practices, merged with universal symbols. In the henna painting on vellum highlighted here, the artist presents a procession of abstract forms, evoking the impression of rhythm and movement of the joyful ceremonies and spiritual gatherings he had witnessed. Sotheby’s Dubai was launched by the global auction house in 2017. The company hosts a programme of year-round events, including selling and non-selling exhibitions, events and talks reflecting the spectrum of Sotheby’s international sales and client services.
