LONDON.- Sotheby’s today announced details of its second auction in Saudi Arabia, building on the landmark event earlier this year that marked the Kingdom’s first international auction. Titled Origins, the offering brings together over 70 works by leading Saudi and Middle Eastern artists alongside renowned international names, many of which are appearing on the auction market for the first time.

Origins will once again be staged in Diriyah, the birthplace of the Kingdom and home to a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Ahead of the auction on 31 January 2026, the full selection will be unveiled in a free public exhibition at Diriyah’s Bujairi Terrace from 24 January. The timing coincides with the opening of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale and falls just ahead of the debut of Art Basel Doha in February, marking Art Basel’s first-ever fair in the Middle East.

The sale unites artworks and objects from across a broad spectrum of collecting categories, including Ancient Sculpture, 20th-Century Design and Prints, Middle Eastern art, Modern and Contemporary works, Latin American art, and Modern and Contemporary South Asian art.

“Our journey in the Middle East will continue with a second auction in Saudi Arabia this January, held alongside the Contemporary Art Biennale, following the success of our inaugural sale earlier this year. We were honoured to be the first international auction house to hold an auction in the Kingdom, and as the market continues to evolve, Sotheby’s remains committed to providing international visibility while supporting the region’s growing art ecosystem. Our focus is on contributing to this dynamic cultural moment, drawing on our global expertise and longstanding passion for art in the Middle East.” --- Ashkan Baghestani, Sotheby’s Head of Sale G Contemporary Art Specialist

“Returning to Saudi Arabia for our second auction in the Kingdom is truly special, not least because it’s my home country. With memories of our first sale still fresh, we look forward to presenting an exceptional range of works to collectors and celebrating the Kingdom’s vibrant art scene on the ground.” --- Fahad Malloh, Director of Business Strategy, Chief of Staff to CEO, Sotheby’s

Safeya Binzagr (1G40-2024), Coffee Shop in Madina Road, oil on board, 1G68, est. $150,000- 200,000

Among the headline lots is a rare and significant work by Safeya Binzagr, one of Saudi Arabia’s pioneering artists and widely regarded as the “spiritual mother” of contemporary Saudi art. Born in Jeddah, in the heart of the old city, Binzagr was deeply inspired by the Kingdom’s cultural heritage, traveling across its regions to document local traditions, customs, and dress. Her lifelong dedication to preserving Saudi identity through art earned her the prestigious King Salman bin Abdulaziz Medal in 2017. Painted in 1968, Coffee Shop in Madina Road offers a rare opportunity to acquire a work from Binzagr’s personal legacy, as the artist seldom sold or gifted her paintings. It comes to auction from the distinguished collection of Alberto Mestas García, the Ambassador of Spain to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from October 1966 to May 1976, and his wife, Mercedes Suárez de Tangil Guzmán. Both Alberto and Mercedes became profoundly fond of Saudi Arabia and befriended many artists whom they met during their time there – it is likely that Mercedes knew Safeya personally, being highly involved in the local cultural scene.

Mohammed Al Saleem (1G3G-1GG7), Untitled, oil on canvas, 1G8G, est. $150,000-200,000

A work by Mohammed Al Saleem – one of Saudi Arabia’s most distinguished modern artists and among the first Saudi artists to receive formal European art education – has been consigned from a private collection in Bahrain. Painted in 1989, the piece is a standout example of Al Saleem’s pioneering style of Horizonism (also referred to as Al-Afakia or the ‘desert style’) – a visual language inspired by the shifting sands and gradated skyline of Riyadh as seen from the desert, as well as the intensity of the Saudi sun. Characterised by rhythmic segmentation and sweeping bands of colour, Horizonism lay at the heart of Al Saleem’s aesthetic vision, enabling him to reimagine the distant dunes in a delicate balance between abstraction and figuration. A true trailblazer, in 1967 Al Saleem held one of Riyadh’s very first solo exhibitions at a time when the Kingdom’s artistic infrastructure was gradually developing, before going on to stage more than 30 solo exhibitions internationally. He currently holds the world auction record for a Saudi artist with a painting sold for $1.1 million at Sotheby’s London in 2023.

Mahmoud Sabri (1G27-2012), Demonstration, oil on canvas, 1G68, est. $400,000-500,000

A rare masterwork by celebrated Iraqi artist Mahmoud Sabri – recognised as a crucial figure in the Iraqi modern art movement – Demonstration testifies to the artist’s powerful visual language and social engagement. Having led a successful career in banking in Baghdad, the artist’s concern for cultural heritage led him to resign and head the Government’s first Iraqi Art Exhibitions Department. With his fundamentally democratic, outward looking, and innovative approach to art and cultural heritage, Sabri was influenced by social-realist imagery after a stint in Moscow studying under the mentorship of the Russian painter Aleksandr Deyneka. Preoccupied with funerary imagery and martyrdom, he sought to depict the suffering and plight of the Iraqi people. Painted in 1968, Demonstration combines Christian imagery with strong social realist components to depict a highly charged scene of five female mourners in the foreground posed in various stages of anguish, set against the shadows of figures marching in the background.

Samia Halaby (b. 1G36), Copper, oil on canvas, 1G76, est. $120,000-180,000

Born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian Christian family, Halaby relocated to the American Midwest as a teenager after being initially displaced to the Lebanese mountains. Earning her MFA at Indiana University, she would go on to hold several teaching posts at institutions across the United States, and become the first full-time female faculty member in the Fine Arts division at the Yale School of Art. Her travels to the Middle East in the mid-1960s led to a stylistic breakthrough in the 1970s, when she abandoned representational subjects altogether and began to explore the diagonal as a dynamic formal element. The angled trajectory across the horizontal axis resonated deeply with her childhood memories of Jaffa and Beirut, where the vast, open meeting of sea and sky along the coastline stirred in her a profound sense of freedom. Her interest in the reflective properties of metal also informed her works from this period. In Copper, Halaby achieves a sense of spatial infinity through repetition and variation. Over the course of her decades-long career, Halaby’s work has been exhibited internationally, and her paintings are housed in esteemed institutional collections, including the Tate Modern, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. In 2024, she was invited to participate in the 60th Venice Biennale, a landmark moment in her celebrated career.

Ahmed Morsi (b. 1G30), Deux Pêcheurs (Two Fishermen), oil on panel, 1G54, est. $120,000- 180,000

Born in Alexandria, Ahmed Morsi’s works remain rare on the market, having appeared only five times previously at auction. The artist has long occupied a celebrated position in the annals of modern Arab art, as a deeply independent voice working across painting, poetry, and printmaking. A recurring presence in Morsi’s work is the sea and in Deux Pêcheurs (Two Fishermen), he turns his attention to the rituals of daily life along the shoreline, rendering a quiet, intimate moment that speaks to the rhythms of a seaside community. The composition is not simply observational, and his forms are not defined by anatomical realism – mood and symbolism are the hallmarks of his visual language. Morsi’s work has been acquired by major institutional collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; The British Museum, London; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; Egyptian Museum of Modern Art, Cairo; and Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1G73), Paysage, oil and Ripolin on cardboard, executed in Mougins on 7 May 1G65, est. $2,000,000-3,000,000

Painted in May 1965, during the final decade of the artist’s life, Paysage stands among the most compelling expressions of Picasso’s late engagement with landscape. The painting depicts the village of Mougins and the rolling hills of the surrounding Massif de l’Esterel, an area in which Picasso and his wife, Jacqueline Roque, relocated in 1961 and remained for the rest of the artist’s life. With exuberant brushwork and a bold palette, Paysage exudes the creative freedom and energy that Picasso found in this new, more secluded locale. Channeling Paul Cézanne’s groundbreaking reinventions of the French landscape, this work also reflects Picasso’s sustained dialogue with the history of art and the Old Masters during his late years.

Anish Kapoor (b.1G54), Untitled, aluminum and paint, 2005, est. $600,000-800,000

A large-scale concave mirror sculpture by Anish Kapoor from the artist’s celebrated and now-iconic series – in a vibrant, saturated pink – marks one of the artist’s most striking articulations of the mirror form. Untitled was executed in 2005, at a moment when Kapoor’s global reputation was cemented by major institutional projects, at Tate Modern in London and in Chicago. First introduced in the late 1990s and continually developed across multiple decades, Kapoor’s wall-mounted concave mirrors occupy a central place in his practice and stand as his defining contribution to contemporary sculpture.

The initial impact of a single, perfectly curved surface is transformed the moment the viewer enters its orbit, as their own image appears inverted and floating. In this version, the deep pink pigment intensifies this disorientation, creating a suspended moment in which perception is rendered fluid and indeterminate.

Andy Warhol (1G28-1G87), Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico), acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, 1G82, est. $800,000-1,200,000

In this 1982 composition, Andy Warhol reinterprets Giorgio de Chirico’s haunting 1917 painting Le Muse Inquietanti through the lens of Pop Art’s serial repetition. Warhol retains the essential motifs of the original work but multiplies them into a grid of repeated images, each rendered in a different palette of saturated purples, acid greens, warm oranges, and high- contrast blacks. Demonstrating a profound sensitivity to the structure of the original, he simultaneously recontextualises its meaning, with the mannequin serving as a symbol of the mechanised human, echoing Warhol’s own fascination with celebrities as manufactured icons. By the 1980s, Andy Warhol had become not only an artistic icon but a cultural force, shaping the New York scene. This decade also marked a deepening of Warhol’s engagement with art history itself. His series after Giorgio de Chirico, of which Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico) is a central and luminous example, signals a profound and deliberate homage to a predecessor whose work mirrored his own fascinations: repetition, the theatricality of constructed images and the mythology of symbols.

The sale also includes Warhol’s complete set of four screenprints of Muhammad Ali, executed in 1978 (est. $300,000-500,000). In the spring of 1977, Warhol embarked on a remarkable series devoted to leading professional athletes, at the behest of American investment banker and sports aficionado Richard Weisman. His portrait sessions with these figures proved unexpectedly revelatory: confronted with their charisma and cultural reach, he swiftly recognised their potential to occupy the same pantheon as his beloved film icons, famously declaring, “Athletes are the new movie stars.” Warhol began by capturing Ali with his Polaroid camera, drawn to the serene focus underlying the boxer’s power; the following year, he produced this four-part suite of screenprints, concentrating solely on Ali’s head and hands. By portraying athletes with the same formal vocabulary he reserved for screen sirens and socialites, Warhol affirmed the democratisation of celebrity in late- 20th-century America and underscored his abiding belief that stardom was the defining currency of the age.

Jean Dubuffet (1G01-1G85), Le soleil les décolore, oil on canvas, 1G47, est. $800,000-1,200,000

When Jean Dubuffet travelled to the Sahara in early 1947, the landscape and nomadic way of life had a profound and immediate impact on his art. Painted shortly after his return to France after the Second World War, Le soleil les décolore is among the first major works in which he explored this experience, capturing the intense light and raw energy of the desert. Spurred by his journey, Dubuffet worked with urgency and physical force, using thick paint and scraped surfaces to convey his immersion in this unfamiliar world – the scorched, weathered effect resonating directly with the painting’s title, The sun discolors them. Appearing at auction for the first time, the work reflects his desire to break away from Western artistic traditions and to see the world anew, standing as a powerful early testament to the influence of Africa on his art and marking a significant encounter between a major European artist and the Arab world.

Works by Roy Lichtenstein from The Collection of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein

The sale will also include seven works by Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) from the treasured personal collection of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein, marking the latest instalment of works to come to auction from the artist’s estate across a series of sales that began in New York in November 2024, and which has already brought in excess of $120m, far exceeding the combined pre-sale estimate. Leading the group are Interior with Ajax (Study), cut painted and printed paper and graphite on paperboard, executed in 1997 (est. $600,000-800,000) – featuring the famed Greek hero from the Trojan War and the study for a painting commissioned by the late fashion designer Gianni Versace, directly from the artist – and The Great Pyramid Banner (Study), tape, cut painted and printed paper and graphite on paperboard, executed in 1980 (est. $150,000-200,000).