Sotheby’s Origins II auction in Diriyah on January 31 realised $19.6 million and produced a new benchmark for Saudi art when Safeya Binzagr’s “Coffee Shop in Madina Road” (1968) sold for $2.1 million with fees, the auction house said in its post-sale statement. The result, achieved after competitive bidding that included a relative of the artist in the room, exceeded the work’s high estimate by a factor of ten and established the highest price ever paid for a Saudi artwork at auction. It also ranks as the third-highest price for any Arab artist, Sotheby’s data shows, while all nine Saudi lots together realised $4.3 million against a combined high estimate of $1.1 million.
Pablo Picasso’s late-period “Paysage,” offered with an estimate of $2 million to $3 million, found only one bidder and sold for $1.6 million, becoming the second-most valuable work sold at auction in the kingdom to date, according to Sotheby’s figures. The contrast highlighted shifting collector priorities at the 250-seat sale, which attracted participants from more than 40 countries with roughly one-third of the 61 lots purchased by buyers based in Saudi Arabia. The auction followed Sotheby’s inaugural Diriyah sale almost exactly one year earlier that totalled $17.3 million with a lower sell-through rate.
Binzagr, a pioneering figure who opened her own museum and gallery in Jeddah in 1995 to preserve and promote Saudi artistic traditions, created the painting as part of a practice focused on documenting everyday life and cultural memory. Offered with provenance from the collection of a former Spanish ambassador to Saudi Arabia and his wife, the work had never before appeared at international auction, Sotheby’s noted. The strong result for her piece and others by Saudi modernists such as Mohammed Al Saleem, whose 1989 untitled work tripled its top estimate to reach $756,000, reflected growing domestic engagement.
Saudi Arabia’s art market has expanded rapidly under the Vision 2030 programme, with creative industry statistics compiled by Gitnux placing sales at 1.5 billion Saudi riyals in 2023 and noting 45 percent growth in modern Saudi works that year. The Ministry of Culture had registered 25,000 artists by 2024, 40 percent of them women, while 150 new galleries and museums opened since 2019 and drew 12 million visitors in 2023 alone. These developments have coincided with increased international auction activity in the kingdom, where the two Sotheby’s Diriyah events have now generated more than $32 million combined.
Sotheby’s global chief executive Charles F. Stewart told Arabian Business that the sale’s curation deliberately placed Saudi and regional works alongside international pieces chosen for their visual or thematic connections. He added that the house was registering stronger participation from regional collectors across its global salerooms. Ashkan Baghestani, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art for the day sale, described the Diriyah results as a clear validation of the growing appetite among collectors in the kingdom for both established and emerging names.
