Dubai market shifts towards emerging homegrown artists

Talk to anyone in Dubai these days and they’ll tell you about the traffic: the sticky thorn in the side of a city that has ridden its post-pandemic bounce to a step change in population, economy and reputation. According to its official count, the United Arab Emirates’ most populous city has added 180,000 new residents since 2022, with a reported 6% being high-net-worth individuals (those whose assets exceed £1m). It has developed a successful fintech industry and softened its immigration policy, which, combined with its no-income-tax earning environment and promises of a life of efficiency and sun, are luring white-collar workers from cost-of-living-crisis Europe.

It’s more difficult to quantify, but there has also been a shift in sentiment towards Dubai. Instead of seeing it as a land of Botox and Bentleys, international curators and collectors are putting artists from the UAE in shows and buying their work, buoying an already busy art scene in the city.

“Everyone is smartening up,” says William Lawrie, the co-founder of the gallery Lawrie Shabibi, which recently underwent a significant renovation at its Alserkal Avenue space. “We have to move with the times. New audiences are coming to Dubai—it’s not clear how significant they are yet in terms of buying, but they are interested, and are showing up at events and openings.”

Many of the galleries who comprise the Dubai scene have been around since the city’s first art boom in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Now new galleries are emerging, and beyond the longtime art centre of Alserkal Avenue. “The idea of Dubai becoming a home rather than a transit place is really relevant,” says Benedetta Ghione, executive director of Art Dubai. “Artists are looking at the city with new eyes. Without wanting to speak on their behalf, they are experiencing a new way of being here, because it feels like a platform that can provide them with many more opportunities, including international ones.”

Gaining gallery representation

The artists on the lists of the galleries are also shifting. Though Dubai was known for exhibiting the work of artists from the Arab region and South Asia, UAE artists themselves were thin on the books. Now young artists from the UAE are moving into gallery representation, such as Afra Al Dhaheri at Green Art Gallery and Rand Abdul Jabbar at Lawrie Shabibi. Tabari Artspace, which primarily showed Arab Modernists, has signed a number of young artists, including Maitha Abdalla, Hashel Al Lamki and the Palestinian, London-based Aya Haidar.

“I am so happy to give opportunities to young artists as that opportunity wasn’t given to me,” says Maliha Tabari, who trained as an artist but never pursued a career as a practitioner, instead setting up her eponymous gallery in the Dubai International Finance Centre complex 20 years ago. “Now there’s a change and shift in Dubai: a lot of people want to start acquiring younger artists.”

Tabari, who is Palestinian and grew up in Saudi Arabia, explains that young artists are priced between $1,000 and $18,000, based on size and medium, meaning that a collector can afford “20 pieces” for the cost of a single older Modernist work. “I have a lot of collectors who bought Modernists and are now acquiring young emerging artists,” she says. “But I also have a lot of new collectors who are buying emerging work, and they’re coming internationally—from New York, Denmark, Amsterdam, Kuwait, Saudi.”

There is also the once-in-a-generation phenomenon of museums with deep pockets opening in the region. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is gearing up for its 2025 launch with a focus on international, Global South and regional artists. Saudi Arabia opened its Museum of Contemporary Art (SAMoCA) in the Jax district outside Riyadh in November last year, and more museums are in the offing, such as Riyadh’s Black Gold Museum, directed by Jack Persekian and the as-yet-unnamed contemporary art museum in AlUla, which Iwona Blazwick is an advisor to.

Lawrie Shabibi, which has lately taken on a number of Arab Modernists, has had a remarkably successful few years because of museum demand. The 81-year-old Iraqi artist Mehdi Moutashar just had a major exhibition at Doha’s Mathaf museum. Last October, Lawrie Shabibi sold most of its booth at Frieze Masters in London, a solo presentation of Moutashar, to Gulf-based and other international institutions. Another of the gallery’s artists, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, who was part of the first wave of Emirati art, represented the UAE at the Venice Biennale in 2022.

And while the war between Israel and Hamas has affected residents in the UAE, many of whom support Palestine, some are seeing Dubai as a new haven for artists who want to speak out about the war—particularly in a context of growing censorship in the US around the issue.

Regional connoisseurship

On the auction side, Christie’s is also reviving its Dubai spring sale, which it axed in 2019 after slowing demand. Last year it held the sale online, with highlights in its Dubai viewing room, which had a 93% sell-through rate. This year the sale will again be preceded by a highlights exhibition in Dubai and run online, changing its name from Middle Eastern Art to Modern and Contemporary Art.

“We felt it was time the sale reflected the region and its connoisseurship more accurately,” says Meagan Kelly Horsman, managing director of Christie’s Middle East. “Many of our consignors and buyers alike aren’t only interested in art from the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] region and diaspora, but collect artists from all over the globe.” The content will remain primarily from Middle Eastern artists, with most of the other work from the Global South.

Sotheby’s, meanwhile, has increased its own presence in Dubai to 12 staff members (from three in 2017), and has likewise moved more heavily into private sales—selling 50% more lots privately in 2023 than in the previous year. It also held the first Sotheby’s Dubai sealed auction, a new online bidding format that is pitched midway between a public and private sale.

Dubai’s identity as a crossroads has always been the calling card for Art Dubai, which has taken a different path to other art fairs that have pursued a franchise model. Its parent, the Art Dubai Group, has concentrated its events in the city: Dubai Design Week, Global Grad Show and Downtown Design, which all take place each November.

In part this is the strategy of the company’s founder, the former banker Ben Floyd, and in part it reflects the amorphous role that the fair has played in Dubai, where its non-commercial programming has a civic flair to it: the fair supports young artists and works to develop a collecting scene. In 2020, it launched the Dubai Collection, an ongoing series of public exhibitions that pull from major Dubai holdings, including that of the ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum—effectively serving as a contemporary museum for a city that never built up a public collection.

Art Dubai’s more recent shifts reflect the changes in the city, particularly that of its burgeoning fintech industry—which the fair is meeting with its dedicated and expanding digital section. And the Modern section, which tends to receive the most critical acclaim, is featuring an anticipated curation of post-Second World War artwork that developed out of Soviet-Arab world exchanges.

“Of course it is in the air that Dubai is having a moment,” says Art Dubai’s Ghione. “But I really hope that we can have a moment in the way that makes sense to us. Because so much of the work we’ve all been doing here has been about questioning existing models. Do we need to be an art fair like every other art fair in the world? Do we need to show more of the mainstream Western art languages that are so well known and represented? Or can we actually platform and foreground voices that are not given the same level of exposure so that we can be a point of discovery?”

This article was corrected on 28 February 2024 to say that the artist shown on Lawrie Shabibi's Frieze Masters stand was Mehdi Moutashar