APPRAISER: So I see you've brought in two paintings by the young Saudi Arabian artist Abdullah Qandeel. And I would love to know a little bit more about how you came to acquire these.
GUEST: Well, I was at a charity auction in New York. I was standing by one of his pieces, and I was curious about the work. I hadn't heard of the artist before, and it turns out I was talking to his manager, who said, "We're headed to another show, actually, "for a friend of Abdullah's. Would you like to join us?"
APPRAISER: Fortuitous.
GUEST: And I said, "Of course." So off I went. It was a really interesting show. Little did I know they had pieces of his work that were going to come out on exhibit in a separate show within a couple of days. They took me behind the scenes, and we started looking at pieces. And he said, "Would you consider taking one home?" And these two really stood out to me. He said, "Why don't we make tonight your night?"
APPRAISER: Was there any kind of backroom negotiating that you went through to acquire these?
GUEST: A little bit. He was very sweet. I had told him, unfortunately, I had lost my wife to breast cancer about three years ago.
APPRAISER: I'm sorry.
GUEST: And the story, I guess, connected with him. This piece, he said, was called, "Love." It seemed to sort of fit. I said, "Look, I'm a person of modest means. "I appreciate art, but I don't have much of a collection. "I'd love to take something home, but I don't know what I can afford." And so we went a little bit of back-and-forth, and he graciously said, "I'm going to make your night. You can take these two home."
APPRAISER: And what year did you purchase these paintings?
GUEST: I bought them in spring of 2015.
APPRAISER: Okay.
GUEST: This one is simply known as "Red," and this one is "Love."
APPRAISER: The artist, as we've said, is Abdullah Qandeel. He's quite young, he's only in his late 20s, I believe. Maybe 27, 28 years old, of Saudi Arabian descent. But really an international character, traveling all over the world, and often living in and out of hotel rooms. And one of the things for which he is most famous or infamous, depending on your point of view, is, when he stays in these hotels, he will often take the hotel art off the wall, repaint it, make it a Qandeel original, or even paint the literal walls of the hotel. And, in fact, in 2015, he was arrested for vandalism after he painted the walls of his hotel room in a Manhattan hotel. Though, given what we all know about hotel art, perhaps the hotel should have been a little happier that he gave them some Qandeel originals and maybe increased the value of some of the art there.
The market for Saudi Arabian art and Middle Eastern art in general is a market that is growing. There's a demand for it that there has not been before. There are a lot of Middle Eastern and Saudi Arabian collectors who are looking for art of their own national origin, and are putting a lot of their resources and finances into that. A number of his pieces have been selling far beyond their estimates at auction recently. What did you pay for the two of them together?
GUEST: I paid $15,000 for the two.
APPRAISER: For the two? I think that if these were to come up at auction today, we might put an auction estimate on these of $25,000 to $40,000 each.
GUEST: Wow!
APPRAISER: And we might very well expect them to do much better than that.
GUEST: That's wonderful, thank you.
APPRAISER: So I think you got a good deal when that man made your night.
GUEST: Indeed!
