.jpg)
Sotheby’s is holding its first online sale in the Middle East, This Too Shall Pass, open for bidding from 18 to 25 June 2020. The auction brings together sixty works from seven Dubai galleries, in what is billed as the first online sale by an international auction house in the region.
The participating galleries are drawn from the Alserkal Avenue cultural district: Lawrie Shabibi, The Third Line, Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Carbon 12, Green Art Gallery, Leila Heller Gallery and 1 x 1 Art Gallery. The selection pairs established artists already held in institutional collections with rising names, with a focus on artists from the Emirates and the wider region.
Ten percent of the galleries’ proceeds will be donated to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its response to the pandemic’s impact on refugee families across twenty countries in the MENA region.
Highlights include Mohamed Melehi’s Soleil Oblique (from the Wave Series), 1971, cellulosic lacquer on wood (est. $80,000 to $120,000); Mona Saudi’s Woman/River, 1998, in Jordanian jade (est. $50,000 to $70,000); Farhad Moshiri’s Rodeo Cowboy, 2018, hand-embroidered beads on canvas (est. $80,000 to $120,000); and Monir Farmanfarmaian’s Untitled (C5), 1993 to 2009, silk and wool hand-woven in Tabriz (est. $40,000 to $60,000). Other artists in the sale include Hassan Hajjaj, Mohammed Kazem, Shaikha Al Mazrou and Chaouki Choukini.
The sale follows a strong run for Sotheby’s online business, which passed £175 million across more than a hundred sales in 2020, more than double the full-year online total for 2019. A March sale of Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern art, converted from a live auction to an online format, totalled $2.7 million, led by a work from Mohamed Melehi that reached a record $487,339, nearly seven times its estimate.
(Press Release)
