Christie's First Abu Dhabi Fine Art Sale Brings In US$8.94 Million
Christie's, the London-based auction house, has raised US$8.94 million from its first dedicated fine art sale in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The sale took place on 1 November 2026 and was titled MAWASIM: 20 Years of Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art. It marks 20 years since the house first held an auction in the country.
The evening session ran at the Abu Dhabi Edition hotel and offered works by artists from the Middle East and North Africa. The top lot was Variations on the Hexagon (2006) by Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, an Iranian artist born in 1924. It sold for $844,800, well above its estimate of $150,000 to $250,000. An estimate is the price range the auction house expects a work to fetch. Bidding for the painting lasted seven minutes.
Other works also beat their pre-sale expectations. Fahrelnissa Zeid's Composition (1948-49) sold for $524,800 against a low estimate of $500,000. Faisel Laibi Sahi's Baghdad Café (The Coffee Shop) (2016) fetched $512,000, against a low estimate of $400,000. Paul Guiragossian's Noces (Wedding) (1958-59) sold for $486,400, just short of its $500,000 high estimate. Ali Banisadr's Homo Deus (2018) also sold for $512,000, below its $550,000 high estimate.
According to Christie's own count, the sale set auction records for nine artists. An auction record is the highest price a work by that artist has fetched at auction. The nine names were Jellal Ben Abdallah, Paul Guiragossian, Faisel Laibi Sahi, Juliana Seraphim, Nabil Kanso, Samia Halaby, Rami Farook, Fatma Lootah and Afra Al Dhaheri. Arab News reported that the works came from 58 artists across 13 countries.
Of the lots offered, 60 sold and 8 did not, according to ArtNews. That gives a sold rate of 88.2 percent. Lots that do not sell are often called unsold, and the auction house can keep them or offer them again later.
Christie's said the sale drew a younger crowd. More than 30 percent of registered bidders were millennials and Gen Z, meaning people born from about 1981 onwards. Some 37 percent of participants were buying from Christie's for the first time.
Christie's also showed three works from its New York sales at the Edition hotel before the Abu Dhabi auction. They were Wassily Kandinsky's Betonte Ecken (1923), with an estimate of $60 million to $80 million, Mark Rothko's Untitled (1968), estimated at $10 million to $15 million, and Pablo Picasso's Tête de femme (1939), estimated at $12 million to $18 million. Those three were not part of the Abu Dhabi sale.
Christie's described the event as Abu Dhabi's first dedicated fine art auction. For the artists and the buyers in the room, it was also the first time a major house had put a sale of this kind on in the city, and the prices show how far the market for Middle Eastern art has come in two decades.
