Art advisors bring Middle Eastern masters to Hong Kong

The appetite for Middle Eastern artists among Chinese collectors is gathering pace—as demonstrated by the latest selling exhibition on show at Sotheby’s Hong Kong gallery. Two Moderns from the Middle East (until 17 November) brings together works by the late Lebanese sculptor Alfred Basbous and the Iranian painter Reza Derakshani. “Basbous worked in the tradition of Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp and Henry Moore,” says the London-based art advisor Arianne Levene Piper, who has co-organised the show with fellow consultant Eglantine de Ganay-d’Espous. Twelve bronze and marble sculptures by Basbous and 15 new works by Derakshani are for sale. (Incidentally) Basbous quietly ploughed his own artistic furrow in the Lebanon, organising the International Symposium of Sculpture in Rachana from 1994 to 2004. Derakshani grew up in northeast Iran “in a great black tent on the top of a mountain, among horses and fields of blue and yellow wild flowers”, a statement says. His Garden Party piece (2017) is among the highlights on view in Hong Kong.