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At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, in November 2020, Christie’s sold Samia Halaby’s 2013 painting Water Lilies for just under $37,000. When the painting returned to the block this May—nearly two years into a broader market correction—it defied the slowdown, selling for $138,600, more than three and a half times its previous result.
That performance was hardly an outlier. Halaby, a Palestinian American artist who has been producing painterly abstractions and computer-inflected experiments since 1959, has seen a sharp rise in institutional attention and market value over the past decade. An ARTnews analysis found that eight of her top 10 auction results were set in the past three years, including three in 2025. Eleven of her works have cleared the six-figure threshold at auction, most within that same time frame.
Institutional momentum has grown in tandem. Halaby’s first US museum survey opened last year at Michigan State University’s Eli and Edyth Broad Art Museum following the cancellation of another portion of the show initially set to appear at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University. That exhibition followed a 2023 retrospective at the Sharjah Art Museum in the United Arab Emirates. In recent years, Halaby’s work has also been included in group exhibitions or commissions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern, the Kunsthalle Wien, and Mudam in Luxembourg.
The same month that Water Lilies sold in 2020, another work set Halaby’s current auction record. The large-format oil painting Mediterranean #279 (1974) blew past its £70,000 high estimate to achieve £400,000 ($534,000) at Christie’s London. (All prices include buyer’s premium unless otherwise noted.)
“It was very interesting to see how, during this time when the art market was really not at its height, we got this depth of bidding,” Marie-Claire Thijsen, associate director of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, told ARTnews.
According to Thijsen, the most coveted period of Halaby’s practice is the 1970s. That’s borne out in recent sales: many of her top results come from her “Diagonal Flight” series (1974–79). In February, at Sotheby’s inaugural sale in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Blue Trap (in a Railroad Station),1977, sold for $384,000—on a high estimate of $200,000. The painting came from the collection of Khaled and Hisham Samawi, the founders of Ayyam Gallery in Dubai, which has represented Halaby since 2006.
Halaby’s rise mirrors broader institutional and market shifts around Arab women artists, according to Noor Soussi, head of Bonhams’s modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art sales. “Female artists like Halaby and Etel Adnan are finally being recognized not only as participants but as pioneers of modernism in the region,” Soussi told ARTnews via email.
Rachel Winter, assistant curator at the Broad Art Museum and the organizer of Halaby’s survey, agreed. “In my opinion, in the last two or so years, sociopolitical events have also prompted people to return some of their attention to artists from the Arab world,” she told ARTnews.
While Halaby’s 1970s canvases have set the high-water mark, her computer-generated works from the 1980s are attracting renewed attention for their prescience. Long before the rise of NFTs and generative art, Halaby worked on early Apple computers to create mesmerizing, colorful abstractions.
“She was so early in being interested in the power of the computer,” Thijsen said.
Yassaman Ali, Phillips’s regional director for the Middle East, told ARTnews in an email that Halaby’s experiments with digital tools “are finally receiving their overdue attention. She is being given a platform for her work to be displayed and appreciated, both institutionally and within private collections and foundations.”
Last year, the Centre Pompidou acquired three of Halaby’s computer-generated works from the 1980s. The Saastamoinen Foundation in Finland added several more. In May, MoMA announced that it had also acquired several of Halaby’s digital pieces via a gift from ARTnews Top 200 collector Ryan Zurrer’s 1OF1 Collection. (Major Collectors and institutions in the Middle East have collected Halaby’s work for years, including Mathaf in Qatar and the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah.)
According to Thijsen, those acquisitions reflect a wider uptick in interest among US and European institutions looking to bolster holdings of Arab and Middle Eastern artists. “They’ve gotten to a point where they don’t have a very strong holding of works from this region, and they’re actively looking to acquire within this category,” she said, adding that American interest has also grown since Halaby’s inclusion in the 2024 Venice Biennale, where she received a special mention from the jury.
“Samia Halaby: Eye Witness” installation view at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, 2024.
Photo: Kyle Flubacker Photography
Christie’s has since conducted multiple private sales of Halaby’s work, both to major institutions and top-tier private collectors.
And despite the political challenges that US museum directors have faced for showing work by Palestinian artists, experts told ARTnews they expect Halaby’s momentum to continue.
“The market is increasingly drawn to artists who have shaped modernism on their own terms, and Halaby is firmly among them,” said Bonhams’s Soussi. “With several important consignments lined up for the autumn season, including works by key Arab female modernists, we anticipate her market will continue to strengthen as collectors and institutions further recognize the depth of her work.”
“She’s constantly challenging the boundaries of painting, of abstraction, of digital art,” Thijsen added. “That is something that, luckily, maybe through this lens of diversity and inclusion, is getting to a larger audience.”
Ali, at Philips, sees Halaby’s digital works as key to her growing legacy, and her renewed relevance amid advances in digital art, blockchain, and artificial intelligence.
“Perhaps, you can say we have finally collectively caught up with Samia Halaby’s thought process as she has always been so forward-thinking,” Ali said. “Maybe that is why we are finally able to appreciate her for who she is.”
