LONDON.- Christie's reveals additional highlights for its landmark auction MAWASIM: 20 Years of Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art. Bringing together 70 works spanning nine decades, the offering traces the richness and diversity of artistic production across the Middle East and North Africa. Taking place on 1 November at The Abu Dhabi EDITION, the sale marks Christie's first fine-art auction in Abu Dhabi and continues the house's longstanding engagement with the region.

The newly announced works further expand the breadth of artistic practices and histories represented in MAWASIM, with works by Faisel Laibi Sahi, Fahrelnissa Zeid, Mohammed Chabâa, Mahmoud Saïd, Ayman Baalbaki, Ali Banisadr and Saliba Douaihy. Together, they reflect the rich artistic exchange across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as the diverse practices that have shaped the region's modern and contemporary art landscape.

Further Auction Highlights

Alongside the previously announced works, newly revealed highlights include:

• Faisel Laibi Sahi, Baghdad Café (The Coffee Shop), October 2016 (estimate: USD$400,000-600,000): Offers a vivid panorama of Iraqi social and cultural life, transforming the coffeehouse into a densely populated theatre of scholars, intellectuals, merchants, workers and storytellers. Drawing on Persian and Mughal miniature painting and the visual language of Maqamat al-Hariri, the work brings together references to Mesopotamian literature, Islamic scholarship and contemporary politics. This monumental painting comes from the prestigious Dalloul Collection, Beirut, founded by Dr Ramzi and Saeda Al Husseini Dalloul and now led by their son, Dr Basel Dalloul.

• Fahrelnissa Zeid, Composition, 1948-1949 (estimate: USD$500,000-700,000): A landmark work from the period in which Zeid developed the distinctive abstract language that established her international reputation in the 1950s. Its kaleidoscopic geometry and luminous colour draw on the artist's experience of seeing Baghdad from the air, as well as Islamic architecture, Byzantine mosaics and stained glass. The painting was photographed hanging in Zeid's studio at the Iraqi Embassy in London, where she worked following her husband Prince Zeid Al-Hussein's appointment as Iraq's ambassador in 1946, and remained in her possession through the upheavals following the 1958 Iraqi Revolution.

• Mohammed Chabâa, Untitled, 1965 (estimate: USD$150,000-250,000): Created at a pivotal moment when the Casablanca School was forging a new visual language for post-independence Morocco, Untitled combines geometric abstraction, graphic design, architectural structure and a stylised human figure. The painting exemplifies Chabâa's distinctive approach to colour, line and geometry. Painted one year before Mohammed Chabâa, Farid Belkahia and Mohamed Melehi's groundbreaking 1966 exhibition at the Théâtre National Mohammed V in Rabat, the painting stands at the heart of the artistic and cultural movement that sought to redefine modernism in Morocco. Of exceptional provenance, it comes directly from the Artist's Estate, offering a rare and intimate connection to this formative moment in Chabâa's career.

• Mahmoud Saïd, Portrait de Princesse Fadia (Portrait of Princess Fadia), 1952 (estimate: USD$400,000-600,000): An intimate royal portrait of the artist's great-niece, Her Royal Highness Princess Fadia, youngest daughter of King Farouk I and Queen Farida of Egypt. Formerly in Her Majesty Queen Farida's collection, the painting captures the young princess with remarkable natural poise, rendered through Mahmoud Saïd's characteristic soft handling of light. Painted just months before the 1952 Egyptian Revolution and the royal family's exile, it offers a poignant image of a vanished royal Egypt, with its provenance preserving a direct link between the artist, his sitter and the family to which she belonged.

• Ayman Baalbaki, Babylon Tower, 2012 (estimate: USD$180,000-250,000): Reimagines the biblical Tower of Babel as a monumental, hollow structure rising from an expansive, almost deserted landscape. Inspired by termite mounds that Baalbaki encountered during a journey to Africa, the tower's scorched reds and ochres, applied in vigorous, expressive brushwork, evoke both primordial architecture and the remnants of a vanished civilisation. The work reflects the artist's sustained engagement with architecture and the psychological traces of conflict, and originates from the Dalloul Collection, Beirut.

• Ali Banisadr, Homo Deus, 2018 (estimate: USD$350,000-550,000): A powerful meditation on humanity's ambition to transcend its biological limits and the increasingly blurred boundary between human and technological existence. Inspired by Yuval Noah Harari's vision of a future transformed by science, technology and artificial intelligence, Banisadr creates an unstable world of fragmented figures and metamorphosing bodies, drawing on Persian miniatures, European masters and his memories of the Iran-Iraq War. The work was included in Banisadr's first solo museum exhibition in Europe, Foreign Lands, at Het Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch in 2019.

• Saliba Douaihy, Paysage (Landscape), 1980s (estimate: USD$120,000-180,000): This work brings together the defining strands of Saliba Douaihy's practice, from his early depictions of northern Lebanon to the refined abstraction for which he became internationally celebrated. Seen from an elevated vantage point, the landscape unfolds in luminous fields of blue, ochre, green and grey, reflecting the artist's exceptional sensitivity to colour and light, qualities also evident in his celebrated stained-glass commissions for Lebanese churches. Rather than marking a return to an earlier period, the work reveals the continuity between Douaihy's landscape and abstract practices.

Marie-Claire Thijsen, Head of Sale, Specialist, Christie's UK and UAE remarked: “This auction brings together some of the most significant names in Middle Eastern modern and contemporary art, with works that demonstrate the extraordinary diversity, ambition and quality of artistic production across the region. Twenty years after Christie's first auction in the UAE, it is hugely exciting to return with a sale of this calibre — one that honours the pioneering modernists who shaped the region's artistic history, while also shining a light on the contemporary talent defining its future. In this sense, MAWASIM, meaning 'seasons' in Arabic, marks a new chapter for Christie's in the region, bringing together the richness of its artistic legacy with the energy and creativity of a new generation.”