Christie's has brought more than $130 million worth of art to Abu Dhabi, pairing highlights from its forthcoming New York November sales with its first fine-art auction in the emirate. The display at The Abu Dhabi EDITION runs from 28 October to 1 November, ahead of the live MAWASIM auction on 1 November, and is presented with support from the Abu Dhabi Investment Office and luxury group Kering.

The centrepiece from New York is Wassily Kandinsky's Betonte Ecken, painted in Weimar between December 1922 and January 1923 and estimated at $60-80 million. The monumental canvas, formerly in the Guggenheim Museum collection, was recently shown at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam and in a Calder exhibition in Paris. Christie's presents it as a forerunner of the artist's celebrated Komposition VIII of 1923, and its specialists expect it to set a new auction record for Kandinsky when it goes under the hammer in New York.

Two further New York highlights travel with it: a 1968 Mark Rothko on paper mounted on linen, estimated at $10-15 million, made after a serious illness forced the artist to stop working at large scale; and a 1939 Pablo Picasso portrait, estimated at $12-18 million, painted at Royan during a period when the identities of his two muses, Dora Maar and Marie-Therese Walter, appear to merge on the canvas.

Alongside them, MAWASIM itself offers 70 works spanning nine decades of modern and contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa, drawn from collections including Beirut's Dalloul Collection and Sharjah's Barjeel Art Foundation. Newly announced lots include a 1989 Saudi canvas by Abdul Halim Radwi evoking space exploration, a 2026 tree sculpture by Ibrahim el-Salahi, and a rare 1966 self-portrait by Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour, who died in August 2026. The sale marks 20 years since Christie's first auction in the UAE, in Dubai in 2006.