Sotheby’s Origins II in Riyadh

A sale built around cultural confidence

Sotheby’s decision to return to Riyadh with Origins II reflects a shift that now feels established rather than emerging. The sale, presented in the city across January and culminating in a live auction on 31 January 2026, is structured as a conversation between international art history and the region’s own modern and contemporary voices. It is not an import. It is a format designed to meet Riyadh’s collecting appetite as it is today: globally fluent, locally anchored, and increasingly specific in taste.

Origins II is deliberately eclectic, but it is not scattered. The selection moves across eras, styles, and geographies, while keeping a clear narrative thread: works that carry cultural weight, visual intelligence, and proven relevance. Sotheby’s positions the sale as a landmark edition that brings Saudi artists into direct proximity with global names, placing them on the same page, in the same room, with the same seriousness.

The anchor lot, Picasso in late period clarity

At the top of the sale sits Pablo Picasso’s Paysage (1965), estimated at $2 million to $3 million.  Executed in Mougins on 7 May 1965, the work carries the markings of Picasso’s late period, where gesture becomes freer and decisions feel immediate.  Its story is also built through its trajectory. The provenance lists Galerie Louise Leiris in Paris, then Galerie Beyeler in Basel, later Paris again, and a subsequent appearance at Christie’s New York in November 2012 before entering the current ownership.

The exhibition history reinforces the point Sotheby’s is making in Riyadh. The painting has been shown in Basel in 1967, in Seoul in 1974, and most recently within a dedicated survey of Picasso landscapes in 2023.  It arrives in Riyadh with both institutional presence and market credibility already established.

Warhol and the language of reference

Another major moment in the sale is Andy Warhol’s The Disquieting Muses (after de Chirico), estimated at $800,000 to $1.2 million.  Created in 1982, the work belongs to Warhol’s sustained practice of quoting and reframing art history through his own language of repetition and surface.  The provenance moves from New York to Paris, and includes a previous sale at Sotheby’s Paris in June 2013, before acquisition by the present owner.

What makes this lot particularly apt for Riyadh is how it mirrors the city’s current cultural posture. It is a work about reference, dialogue, and context, all ideas that now define how art is being consumed, exhibited, and collected in the Kingdom.

Dubuffet, where the market meets museum history

Jean Dubuffet’s Le soleil les décolore (1947), estimated at $800,000 to $1.2 million, carries a different kind of authority.  This is a mid century European work with deep institutional life. The provenance and exhibition history reads like a map of postwar collecting, with appearances including Galerie René Drouin in 1947 and later museum exhibitions in Paris, Ghent, Amsterdam, and beyond.

For collectors, that matters. In a sale staged in Riyadh, this kind of lot signals that the city is not only participating in the market, it is being trusted with works that have already been validated by museums and scholarship.

The Saudi and Arab modernism section, framed as legacy rather than category

Origins II does not isolate regional works into a separate statement. It treats them as foundational. The Saudi and Arab modernism lots stand out because they represent lived cultural memory, rendered through artists whose practices built visual language in the region long before the current pace of expansion.

Sotheby’s highlights Safeya Binzagr’s Coffee Shop in Madina Road, estimated at $150,000 to $200,000, placing her within the central narrative of the sale rather than as a local add on.  It sits alongside Samia Halaby’s Copper, estimated at $120,000 to $180,000, a work that reflects Halaby’s long relationship with abstraction and modernism.

The inclusion of Mohammed Al Saleem, with works such as Untitled and Flow, both estimated at $150,000 to $200,000, reinforces the direction.  These are not decorative lots. They are positioned as a part of the region’s intellectual and aesthetic formation, with pricing that reflects growing seriousness around their place in collections.

Global contemporary, calibrated for a collecting city

The sale’s international contemporary selection is similarly measured. Jean Michel Basquiat’s Untitled appears with an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000, a price band that allows access to a major name without turning the sale into a single headline.

Roy Lichtenstein’s Interior with Ajax (Study) sits at $600,000 to $800,000, speaking to collectors drawn to the discipline of pop without requiring the scale or pricing of the most famous canvases.  James Turrell’s Origen is estimated at $350,000 to $450,000, aligning with the region’s interest in light, perception, and spatial experience, ideas that resonate strongly in Gulf collecting and commissioning.

Why Origins matters in Riyadh now

What Origins II ultimately reveals is that Sotheby’s is not treating Riyadh as a stop. It is treating it as a market with its own tempo and long term potential. The sale is built to reflect a city where collecting is becoming more narrative driven, less logo led, and more aware of what it means to own work with history, provenance, and cultural relevance.

In that sense, the most telling element of Origins II is not a single lot. It is the editorial logic of the auction itself. Picasso next to Binzagr. Warhol next to Al Saleem. This is the structure of confidence, and Riyadh is ready for it.