On Sunday, Christie’s hosted its debut fine art sale in Abu Dhabi, “ MAWASIM: 20 Years of Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art ,” to mark the auction house’s 20th anniversary of its first auction in the United Arab Emirates. The sale totaled $8.94 million.

The evening sale held at the Abu Dhabi Edition hotel featured works by artists from the Middle East and North Africa. Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s Variations on the Hexagon (2006) led the auction, selling for $844,800; the painting’s estimate was $150,000 to $250,000. Bidding for the work by Farmanfarmaian, who is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, lasted for seven minutes.

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Other notable lots included Fahrelnissa Zeid’s Composition (1948-49), which sold for $524,800, beating its low estimate of $500,000; Faisel Laibi Sahi’s Baghdad Café (The Coffee Shop) , 2016, which sold for $512,000, beating its low estimate of $400,000; and Ali Banisadr’s Homo Deus (2018), which brought in $512,000…