Christie’s Abu Dhabi Built Its Own Walls Inside a Hotel Ballroom

Art & Culture · Abu Dhabi

Reading time: 16 min

Christie’s returns to the Gulf twenty years after its first sale there, and for the second time it does so in a hotel. This time it has brought the gallery with it: the ballroom at The Abu Dhabi EDITION has been rebuilt from the inside as a maze of white plasterboard under suspended lighting rigs, leaving the chandeliers showing above the partitions. The seventy works going up on those walls are, to an unusual degree, paintings about walls, rooms and buildings. Two of them were made by men who ran a school in Casablanca modelled on the Bauhaus. A third, visiting from New York, was painted by the man who ran the Bauhaus wall painting workshop.

---

The first thing to understand about Christie’s Abu Dhabi is that there is no Christie’s building in Abu Dhabi. MAWASIM: 20 Years of Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art is a live auction on 1 November 2026, and it takes place in the ballroom of The Abu Dhabi EDITION on Al Bateen Marina, with a public view and a programme of talks running from 28 October. It is the first fine art auction Christie’s has held in the emirate.

That makes the room itself a design question rather than a footnote. Seventy paintings and sculptures have to be hung, lit and sold inside an interior built for dinners and dancing, which in practice has meant building a second interior inside the first. The sale marks twenty years since Christie’s first auction in the United Arab Emirates, and the symmetry is worth noticing: that one was in a hotel too.

I walked it at the press preview. What follows is an account of the works, the people who made them, and the rooms that keep turning up inside them.

Two ballrooms, twenty years apart

On 24 May 2006, Christie’s sold 127 lots at the Jumeirah Emirates Towers in Dubai. It was the first sale held in the region by an international auction house, and the venue was a hotel because the alternative was to build one. The Emirates Towers were designed by Hazel W. S. Wong with NORR Group Consultants International and completed in April 2000, sixty-seven floors of triangular plan and dark glass that were, at the time, the tallest thing on Sheikh Zayed Road.

Twenty years later the house is in a different emirate and a very different building. The Abu Dhabi EDITION was shaped by Wimberly Interiors in collaboration with the Ian Schrager Company, and it reads as a hotel that has been thought about surface by surface. Bronze screens drawn from traditional Emirati architecture divide the lobby seating. The reception desk is clad in brass. There is a gold leaf wall washed from above, English oak panelling and a Nero Marquina bar in the Oak Room, Calacatta counters and Thonet bentwood chairs in the Market, terrazzo on the terrace. The ballroom itself has gently coffered ceilings, crystal chandeliers and walls of bevelled leather panels trimmed in bronze.

Almost none of which you will see. For MAWASIM the ballroom has been rebuilt from the inside out. White plasterboard partitions have been stood up across the floor and set out as a route, so that instead of one open volume there is a run of smaller rooms, returns and corners to work through, and lighting rigs have been suspended from the ceiling to put light onto the paintings rather than onto the decoration. Seventy works need far more hanging wall than any ballroom carries around its edges, and the only way to get it is to build it inward. The leather and the bronze are still there behind the plasterboard. They are simply not part of the sale.

What does survive is the chandeliers, which hang below the ceiling and above the line of the partitions. From inside the maze you are looking at flat white walls with a hotel ceiling floating over the top of them, and that double reading is the most interesting thing in the room. I lost my bearings in there almost immediately, which turns out to be the point: the route keeps putting one more wall between you and the next painting, so each one arrives on its own, with nothing else in the eye at the same time. Christie’s has not borrowed a ballroom and hung pictures in it. It has imported a gallery, wall by wall, into a building that had no use for one, and it will take the gallery out again on 2 November. The white room is normally something a city commissions in concrete and keeps for fifty years. Here it arrives flat, stands for five days, and leaves.

The painters who wanted to be on walls

Two of the strongest things in MAWASIM come out of the same school, and that school was built on an argument about architecture.

Mohamed Melehi was born in Asilah in 1936. His A30 of 1962 belongs to the group of black paintings he began around 1960, in the years either side of his time at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome: a tall canvas divided into a black field and a cream field by a single grey band that bends from top to bottom like a road seen from the air. Almost all the colour has been taken out, and what is left is a decision about where an edge should go. Between Rome and New York, Melehi spent a period in Minneapolis, where he had gone intending to study architecture and ended up teaching painting instead.

Mohammed Chabâa was born in Tangier in 1935 and trained in Tetouan before spending 1962 to 1964 at the same Rome academy. His Untitled of 1965 is the other side of the same sensibility: flat orange, flat black, a white bar, a crimson arabesque crowded into the bottom right corner, and a black shape in the upper left that could be read as a plan, a doorway or a figure. It has the logic of a drawing made with a set square rather than a brush, which is more or less what Chabâa went on to do for a living. From 1966 he taught at the School of Fine Arts in Casablanca and at the National School of Architecture in Rabat, taught decoration and scenography, founded Studio 400 as a graphic and interior design practice, and designed the covers of Souffles.

Under Farid Belkahia, who directed the Casablanca school from 1962 to 1974, the faculty was assembled on a Bauhaus model: painting taught alongside craft, textiles, typography and architecture, with the architects Faraoui and de Mazières collaborating on interiors and public infrastructure. In 1969 the group carried the argument outside and installed paintings and murals in public squares in the Marrakech medina and in Casablanca, where they stayed for ten days. The point was never that art should hang in a salon. The point was that it belonged on a wall somebody walked past.

Which is what makes the third painting in this part of the room so satisfying. Christie’s is bringing three works from its New York sales to Abu Dhabi for the view, and the largest of them is Wassily Kandinsky’s Betonte Ecken, a canvas 130 centimetres square, of overlapping brown and blue triangles, ruled black lines, chequers and small coloured discs. It was painted in Weimar in December 1922 and January 1923. Kandinsky had been appointed to the Bauhaus that June, and from 1922 to 1925 he directed its wall painting workshop. The picture was in the Guggenheim collection from 1941, when the museum acquired it from Hilla Rebay, until the mid-1960s, and it goes on sale in New York on 17 November.

The three New York works hang at the end of the route, in a section of their own, and the Kandinsky is the last thing you come to. I should declare an interest. Kandinsky was the first artist I was ever introduced to, and more of my interest in art traces back to that than to anything else I can name. Standing in front of a canvas of this size and this rarity, in a ballroom on Al Bateen Marina, a few weeks before it is expected to set a new auction record for the artist, is not a neutral experience and there is no point pretending otherwise. There is a neat accident folded into it as well. The painting belonged to the Guggenheim in New York from 1941 until the mid-1960s. It is being shown in Abu Dhabi six weeks before the Guggenheim here opens its doors.

So for five days in Abu Dhabi, a canvas made by the man in charge of the Bauhaus wall painting workshop will hang a few metres from two paintings by men who ran a Bauhaus-modelled school in Casablanca and spent their careers getting work out of galleries and onto walls that people walked past. Christie’s has done the exact opposite and carried the gallery wall in to meet them. Nobody appears to have planned any of it. It is the best thing in the room.

Rooms, towers and villages

Once you start looking for architecture in this sale it is difficult to stop.

Faisel Laibi Sahi’s Baghdad Café (The Coffee Shop), painted in October 2016, is a wide frieze of a room, and it has been inventoried object by object. A chequered floor in a dozen muted colours. A shelf running the full width carrying teapots, a brass coffee pot, a samovar, a mantel clock, a tuba, a gramophone horn, a coffee grinder, a trophy. Below it a crowd of scholars, workers, merchants and a fishmonger, arranged in the flattened, stacked space of Persian and Mughal miniature painting and of the illustrated Maqamat of al-Hariri, the Basran writer whose twelfth-century text was copied and illustrated by al-Wasiti in 1237. Sahi was born in Basra in 1947, trained in Baghdad and then in Paris at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the Sorbonne, and lives in London. The painting comes from the Dalloul Collection in Beirut.

Ayman Baalbaki’s Babylon Tower of 2012 is a building and almost nothing else: a tiered, hollow ziggurat rising out of an empty plain, built up in slabs of scorched red and ochre so thick the paint reads as masonry. Baalbaki, born in 1975 and trained at the Lebanese University and at ENSAD in Paris, has said the form came from termite mounds he saw on a journey in Africa, and the reading holds all the way through the picture: not a monument but a nest, raised by a colony and then left.

Saliba Douaihy painted his Paysage in the 1980s, long after he had become known for hard-edged abstraction, and it looks back at Ehden, the northern Lebanese town where he was born in 1915. The village sits on a green shoulder above limestone crags, red roofs and a church tower picked out against rose-coloured ridges. Douaihy apprenticed with Habib Srour in Beirut from the age of fourteen, studied in Paris, and moved to New York in 1950. He spent much of his later career working in and for buildings: the mural of Our Lady of Harissa behind the altar at the Maronite cathedral in Brooklyn in 1952, and sixty-five painted glass panels for Our Lady of Lebanon in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, in 1978.

Inji Efflatoun’s Untitled of 1987 is one of her last paintings, and it is a roofscape. Flat-roofed houses stack down a slope above a stretch of river with a single sail on it, drawn in short, restless coloured strokes, with large areas of the canvas left completely blank. Efflatoun, born in Cairo in 1924, was imprisoned between 1959 and 1963, and from 1974 onwards she worked in what became known as her white light paintings, leaving the ground bare so that the light in the picture is the canvas itself rather than a colour she mixed. It comes from the Dalloul Collection.

Mahmoud Saïd’s Portrait de Princesse Fadia is a room too, although the room is only implied: a grey-green wall, the edge of a panel, a vase of white flowers, and a child of eight or nine in a pink flounced dress sitting very straight on a bench. Saïd was born in Alexandria in 1897 and died there in 1964, on his birthday. He took a law degree in Cairo in 1918 and spent his working life in the Mixed Courts, resigning in 1947 to paint full time. The family connection is closer than it first appears: his niece Safinaz Zulfikar became Queen Farida in 1938, which made the sitter his great-niece. He painted her in 1952, months before the revolution of 23 July, and the picture was afterwards in her mother’s collection.

Surfaces you could read with your hands

A second group in the sale is about what paint can be made to do physically, which is where those flat white walls and the rigs above them earn their keep.

Samia Halaby’s Yesterday of 1978 is built from wide diagonal bands pulled right across the canvas in one continuous movement, grey into black into a burning orange, with a single yellow line at the left edge holding the whole thing in place. The striations are visible everywhere, so you can see exactly how fast the hand moved. Halaby was born in Jerusalem in 1936 and joined the faculty of the Yale School of Art in 1972 as its first full-time woman, and the painting was shown at Sharjah Art Museum in its Lasting Impressions series in 2023 and 2024.

Marwan, who was born Marwan Kassab-Bachi in Damascus in 1934 and died in Berlin in 2016, built his Kopf (Head) of October 1987 out of ridges. The head is upright and frontal, nearly two metres tall, and the features have been worked over so many times in ochre, crimson, violet and yellow that they have come most of the way back to landscape. Marwan went to Germany in 1957, studied under Hann Trier in Berlin and taught there for decades. The painting was shown at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris in 1988, the year after Jean Nouvel’s building opened with its wall of photosensitive mashrabiya diaphragms.

Nabil Nahas’s Inka Dinka Doo of 2013 is in three parts and runs to four and a half metres across: a gold ground worked into a dense repeating texture, then overlaid with looping strings of white beads, ribbons of blue and orange, and concentric rings that read as cells one moment and galaxies the next. Nahas was born in Beirut in 1949, grew up between Beirut and Cairo, studied at Louisiana State University and Yale, and works in New York. He is representing Lebanon at the 61st Biennale di Venezia this year with Don’t Get Me Wrong, a frieze of twenty-six panels across roughly forty-five linear metres in the Artiglieri building at the Arsenale, curated by Nada Ghandour with scenography by Charles Kettaneh and Nicolas Fayad of EAST Architecture Studio.

Nadia Saikali’s Mandala Bleu Nuit of 1982 does the opposite and almost disappears. It is a square of blues so dark they read as black, with a lighter band floating across the middle and a bright blue bleeding out at all four edges where the pigment has run past the stretcher. It needs a wall that will not compete with it, and for five days it is going to get one. It will be the painting people stand in front of longest. It comes from the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, founded in 2010 by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, which has five works in the sale and a long-term display at Sharjah Art Museum.

What else is in the room

Fahrelnissa Zeid’s Composition of 1948 to 1949 is one of the most important things in the sale, a stone-grey field crossed by looping black outlines that trap cells of red, blue, yellow and green like leaded glass. Zeid was born on Büyükada in 1901 and died in Amman in 1991. Her husband, Prince Zeid bin Hussein, became Iraq’s first ambassador to the Court of St James’s in 1946, and she painted in a studio at the embassy in London until the family was given a day to leave it in July 1958. She described flying as the thing that changed her sense of space, and this is a painting made by someone who had learned to look down.

Ali Banisadr’s Homo Deus of 2018 takes its title from Yuval Noah Harari and its structure from Persian miniature: a surge of half-formed figures, horses and machines along the bottom third of a three-metre canvas, dissolving upward into a pale, turning sky. Banisadr was born in Tehran in 1976 and lives in New York; the painting was in Foreign Lands at Het Noordbrabants Museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch in 2019, his European museum début.

Elsewhere in the sale, Abdul Halim Radwi’s Afaq Halima of 1989 brings space exploration and the circling motion of tawaf into the same composition. Radwi was born in Mecca in 1939, trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome and then in Madrid, and made Poetry Garden in 1969, his first sculpture, for the corniche at Jeddah. Ibrahim El-Salahi’s Meditation Tree 6, made this year, is one of five larger trees from Salahi’s Forest at Desert X AlUla, and takes the form of the Haraz, the acacia that leafs in the dry season and goes bare when the rains come. Sliman Mansour’s Self Portrait of 1966, from the Dalloul Collection, is an early and very direct picture of a face, a walking stick and a closed fist; Mansour died in August 2026 at the age of seventy-nine.

The two other New York works on view are a Mark Rothko of 1968, acrylic on watercolour paper laid on linen, with the raw paper borders left by the masking tape still showing, and Pablo Picasso’s Tête de femme of 1939 from the Royan period, in which the pale profile and the shadowed one slide into each other. A selection of Private Sales works hangs alongside, with jewels and watches shown by appointment.

How to see the Christie’s Abu Dhabi exhibition

The exhibition is open at The Abu Dhabi EDITION, Al Bateen Marina, from 28 October to 1 November 2026, with the live auction on 1 November at 5pm Gulf Standard Time. The pre-sale exhibition is open to the public. The works travelled before they arrived, shown at Christie’s in New York in September and in Paris and London through October, and the Abu Dhabi programme adds talks and previews around the hang.

MAWASIM, which means seasons in Arabic, brings together work from Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Palestine, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, made across most of the last century and this one, through to a sculpture finished this year. Eight works come from the Dalloul Collection in Beirut and five from the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah. The sale is led by Marie-Claire Thijsen, Head of Sale and Specialist for Christie’s in the UK and the UAE, with Dr Ridha Moumni as Chairman of Christie’s Middle East and Africa and Meagan Kelly Horsman as Managing Director in the UAE. It is presented in strategic partnership with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office, with support from Kering, The Abu Dhabi EDITION and DIETL by Rock-It.

It also opens a season. Frieze Abu Dhabi runs from 19 to 22 November at Manarat Al Saadiyat, and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi opens on 11 December.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Read the sale as a list of rooms and it changes shape.

A coffeehouse inventoried shelf by shelf. A tower built like a termite mound. A hill village in northern Lebanon and a roofscape above the Nile. A grey-green wall behind a child in pink. Leaded glass without the lead. A painting made by the head of the Bauhaus wall painting workshop, and two by the men who taught in a school built on his model and then took the work outside and put it on walls in a public square.

For five days all of that will hang on white plasterboard carried into a ballroom and stood up as a maze, under rigs suspended from the ceiling, with the hotel’s chandeliers still showing above the partitions. Then the walls come out and the room goes back to being a ballroom. Christie’s has never had a building of its own in this part of the world. It has simply become very good at bringing one with it.