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Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: A Mirror Mosaic Leads Christie's First Abu Dhabi Sale

Variations on the Hexagon, 1 of 6 mirror mosaic panels Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian made for the V&A in 2006, sold for $844,800 on November 1, leading MAWASIM, the first fine art auction held in Abu Dhabi.

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On November 1, Christie's held MAWASIM: 20 Years of Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art at The Abu Dhabi EDITION, the first fine art auction in Abu Dhabi and a marker of 20 years since its first UAE sale, in Dubai in 2006. The evening brought 70 lots by 58 artists from 13 countries and totalled $8,940,800. It was led, after almost 7 minutes of bidding, by Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian's Variations on the Hexagon (2006), which sold for $844,800 against an estimate of $150,000 to $250,000.

The work is a mirror mosaic panel with blue glass, reverse glass painting and plaster on wood, 183 by 130 cm. It is 1 of 6 monumental panels Farmanfarmaian made in her Tehran studio for the opening of the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2006; another panel from that installation is in the V&A's collection. Interlocking hexagons sit at its centre, subdivided and repeated across the surface. "For me everything connects with the hexagon," she said, relating its 6 sides to the 6 directions of space and to 6 virtues, among them patience and compassion.

The technique is āyeneh-kāri, silvered glass cut into shapes and set in plaster, practised in Iran since mirrors were first imported in the 16th and 17th centuries. Farmanfarmaian began working with it in the 1970s alongside Iranian craftsmen, after sitting in the mirrored interior of the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz and watching visitors multiply across its surfaces. Frank Stella put her achievement simply: "Monir has taken it off the wall and made it into essentially its own surface." Born in Qazvin in 1922, she studied at Parsons in New York in the 1940s, moving in a circle that included Milton Avery and later Andy Warhol, and died in Tehran in 2019.

The rest of the sale set 9 auction records, including medium records for Paul Guiragossian, whose Noces (Wedding) (1958 to 1959) made $486,400, and Samia Halaby, whose Yesterday (1978) made $358,400. Emirati artists Rami Farook, Fatma Lootah and Afra Al Dhaheri and the Lebanese painter Nabil Kanso made their auction debuts, with works from the Dalloul Collection in Beirut and the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah also on offer.

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