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Sotheby’s to sell contemporary art at Doha auction

DOHA, April 14, 2015

Sotheby’s, an international auction house, is set to conduct a sale of contemporary art in Doha on April 21.

The sale will comprise a selection of top-caliber works by leading Arab, Iranian and international contemporary artists with examples of painting, installation art, photography, and sculpture.

Prior to the sale, an elegantly curated highlights exhibition will be open to the public from April 14 to 22 at the same venue as the auction - Katara Art Center, Building 5, Doha.

The highlight of the international Contemporary Art is Anish Kapoor’s ‘Untitled’ from the artist’s ‘Pixelated Disk’ series, another one of which sold at Sotheby’s Doha in October last year to great acclaim, setting the highest price for the artist in the Middle East and the highest auction price for a work from this series by Kapoor.

Internationally revered artist Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled, 2001, is another featured highlight of the sale (estimated at $600,000/800,000). 

Stingel’s desired Celotex series of paintings is a sumptuous and shimmering canvas in which the artist captures the passage of time.  This marquis graffiti-covered work references gestural abstraction, as well as graffiti art, culminating into a reflective canvas of eternal abstract beauty. 

The sale will also feature a bold, graphic Christopher Wool work. Created between 1986-1987, the work is one of the artist's earliest, most desirable and sought-after pattern paintings (estimated at $1/1.5 million).

Made using paint rollers incised with floral designs that transferred the patterns onto an aluminium canvas, the severe black enamel pattern against the white background collapses any distinction between the physical process of making the work and its visual context.  

These everyday tools provided Wool with a repertoire of ready-made imagery, and the small inconsistencies created during the process convey a delicate, yet powerfully emotional resonance.

A further highlight of the sale is El Anatsui’s ‘Introvert’, a found aluminium and copper wire installation that creates a powerful piece which addresses a range of social, political and historical topics (estimated at $700,000/1 million).  

With the novel ability of an owner to sculpturally manipulate the piece to whatever visual presentation is desired, Introvert exemplifies Anatsui’s signatory method of artistic production coupled with his principal ideology of reassigning purpose to waste. By transforming found objects into fine art Anatsui's cloths cause the observer to examine their preconceptions of waste material, its relationship to beauty and how art cannot be confined to strict definitions.

Internationally acclaimed and highly sought-after artist Ali Banisadr’s work has been heavily influenced by his childhood experiences as a refugee of the Iran-Iraq war. His output is dominated by large-scale fantastical abstract landscapes that convey something of the chaotic violence he witnessed as a child.  

Having developed through a prism of art historical references from medieval imagery to abstract expressionism and drawing on both Eastern and Western artistic traditions, ‘The Shrines’ from 2011 ($100,000/150,000, page 1) appears at auction comes just six months after Sotheby’s set a record for the artist in Doha with The Chase.

Chant Avedissian’s ‘Icons of the Nile’ (in 21 parts) from 2010 (estimated at $150,000/200,000) is  another highly important installation work by the Egyptian artist which has many similarities to the Icons of the Nile piece which set the artist record at Sotheby’s Doha in April 2013.

Avedissian’s remarkable use of stencils is the result of more than twenty years of research during his extensive travels.

Meanwhile, Ayman Baalbaki is another artist whose auction benchmark was set at Sotheby’s Doha last year. This season, the sale includes ‘Al-Mulatham’ from 2009 which, like many of the artist’s major works, depicts the shrouded face of a lone, heroic figure gazing up to the skies (estimated at $80,000/120,000).

Baalbaki was born in Lebanon in 1975 - the year the civil war began that eventually led to the displacement of his family. Many of the artist’s traumatic experiences during the war have provided the inspiration for and subjects of his most powerful work.

Dominated by the traditional red and white kaffiyeh headdress, a garment worn by men throughout the Arab world as protection against sun exposure and sandstorms, Baalbaki’s monumental portrait evokes a broad spectrum of interpretations and responses ranging from the political to the emotional.

A further highlight is Untitled from 1981, a rare and early 'peau relief' by Farid Belkahia, Morocco's foremost artist (estimate at $40,000/60,000). In a career spanning five decades, Belkahia has favoured the medium of leathers, impregnating them with henna, in an attempt to both, physically and emotionally root his oeuvre in the landscape of tradition and crafts.

‘I’ve got Sunshine’ by Farhad Moshiri is made up of dozens of found knives dug into a thick and creamy canary canvas as a striking example of the artist's interest in the Baroque and Mannerist movement, (estimated at $120,000/180,000).

Abdulnasser Gharem is considered the patriarch of the group of young Saudi Arabian artists, who are part of ‘Edge of Arabia’, an internationally recognised platform promoting artistic exchange between the Middle East and western world.

‘Men At Work’ (Time Magazine Person Of The Year 2003: The American Soldier) is typical of his work in which recognisable icons such as road signs, political figures and trademarks are juxtaposed within a kaleidoscope of Islamic motifs (estimated at $20,000/30,000). - TradeArabia News Service




Tags: Art | Doha | Auction | sell |

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