DUBAI: Highlights from Sotheby’s exhibition of highlights from its upcoming Modern & Contemporary Middle East and Arts of the Islamic World & India auctions.

Abdulhalim Radwi 

‘Untitled (Desert Scene)’ 

The late Abdulhalim Radwi is one of the most significant Saudi artists of all time. He studied in Italy in the 1960s and his work has drawn comparisons to that of the great French impressionist Paul Cézanne and the Dutch master Vincent Van Gogh. “Radwi’s ability to merge popular culture and sentiments with newly acquired artistic techniques serves as a precursor to contemporary Saudi art today,” an old Sotheby’s catalogue states. At first, however, his style was met with confusion in his homeland, where local artistic sensibilities “very much remained grounded in more realistic artistic renderings.” Discussing his first local exhibition in 1964, Radwi said: “My works were shot down in exoticism, irony and surprise, while the people’s visual imagination in that era was held by representation and copying from reality.” The Sotheby’s catalogue continues: “He was driven by the conviction that art has a cerebral function in an environment that considered it as ornamental. According to Radwi, the very essence of a piece lies not in its physicality but in the emotions it triggers.” This piece — a mix of oil paint and sand on canvas — was created in 1975, and is expected to fetch between £40,000 and £60,000 (SAR 203k-305k) in October’s auction.  

Ahmed Mater 

‘X-ray Painting 5’ 

This work from arguably Saudi Arabia’s most important contemporary artist comes from the series that established him as a pioneer of the Kingdom’s art scene back in 2004, when he was featured alongside Abdulnasser Gharem and Sahraf Fayadh in a Jeddah exhibition. It combines his two occupations: medicine and art. “In these works, the first synthesis of art and science, faith and medicine can be seen,” Mater writes on his website.  

“Ahmed Mater demonstrates the very special ability to speak in a universal voice but from a personal perspective,” Linda Komaroff of the LA Country Museum of Art wrote in a 2010 essay in which she also noted of the artist’s “X-ray” series: “What could be more intimate and personal than literally to see inside another individual? … The skeletal images suggest some elemental form of humanity, stripped of the skin, hair, eyes, and clothes that differentiate as well as separate us.” 

Paul Guiragossian 

‘Portefaix en Chomage’ 

This depiction of unemployed porters is typical of the acclaimed Jerusalem-born Lebanese-Armenian artist’s work, in terms of both subject matter and style. “Guiragossian was primarily a painter of clustered people: elongated figures, huddled close together, hunched or squatting. They crowd the canvas, never over-spilling its edges. Togetherness usually feels threatened, somehow, but also a spell that might ward against loss,” the art writer and curator Sam Thorne wrote in 2014. Speaking to Selections, the art website, in 2019, one of Guiragossian’s daughters said: “He would say he was like a reporter of his environment. When he was unemployed, he painted the street porters who were unemployed and hungry. When he got married … (and) had children, he painted families. I would say his objective in the early stages was portraying marginalized people based on his own life.” 

Fahrelnissa Zeid 

‘Untitled (Flowers)’ 

Zeid was an extraordinary artist who lived an extraordinary life, which included seeing her brother convicted of the murder of their father, marrying an Iraqi prince, and becoming the first woman to have a solo exhibition at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts (in 1954). “Her practice underwent transformations ranging from a figurative expressionism to the abstract sublime,” an old Sotheby’s catalogue states. “Untitled (Flowers)” dates from the late 1940s, a time when Zeid’s artistic style was in the midst of that transition from figurative artwork to a more complex abstraction, and bridges those two worlds. It is expected to fetch between £40,000 and £60,000 at auction.     

Hassan Hajjaj 

‘BB Stance’ 

This work from 2000 is a classic example of the Moroccan filmmaker, designer and photographer’s signature style — vibrant colors, stylized poses, and a border of that puts a twist on Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” by using products local to the Moroccan market (in this case, beef mortadella). “His frames are at once a nod to the twentieth-century avant garde concept of the readymade, as well as to his childhood in Morocco, where recycling was an everyday part of his life,” an entry on Sotheby’s website reads. “Hajjaj’s inclination to such materials is prompted by their immediacy and multifaced nature; in another act of recovery, the repeated patterns also make reference to Moroccan zellige tiles.” This particular image also references another of Hajjaj’s major influences — hip-hop. 

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian  

‘A Drawing (Variations on a Hexagram)’ 

Arguably Iran’s best-known female artist, Farmanfarmaian crafted her own definitive style over the course of her six-decade career, mixing classical Iranian culture and Islamic geometry with avant garde ideas often inspired by her time in New York in the 1940s and 1950s — and again in the Seventies and Eighties. She is perhaps most well-known for her mirror mosaics, but drawings such as this one clearly show her fascination with geometry and the principles of Islamic art, which was the cornerstone of those famed mosaics.