Exhibition: 2–6 December 2025, Abu Dhabi & 13–21 December, New York

This December, Sotheby’s will present Icons in two cities across the globe. Icons: Abu Dhabi, on view from 2 to 6 December as part of the inaugural Collectors’ Week, offers the first look at this landmark project. Icons: Back to Madison will follow in New York from 13 to 21 December, inaugurating our new global headquarters at the Breuer Building and marking our return to Madison Avenue for the first time since 1980. Together, these presentations introduce a dialogue between past and present, bringing forward some of the most extraordinary works ever handled by Sotheby’s.

Across both venues, the Icons exhibitions span more than five millennia of artistic achievement and encompass nine collecting categories, from African and Oceanic Art to Jewelry, Luxury, and Fine Art with artworks dating as early as 1831 through 2018. The Abu Dhabi presentation includes the Guennol Lioness, a 5,000-year-old Mesopotamian sculpture and one of the most important antiquities ever sold. Its inclusion sets the stage for a wider narrative, anchoring the exhibition in the earliest chapters of artistic creativity and progressing through major milestones of twentieth-century art. Presented alongside the Guennol Lioness in Abu Dhabi are Banksy’s Girl without Balloon, the self-shredding work created live in the Sotheby’s salesroom that remains a defining moment in twenty-first-century art history, as well as Jane Birkin’s original Hermès Birkin, an icon of design and craftsmanship whose historic auction result reflects the broader evolution of collecting in the luxury category.

Icons: Back to Madison builds on this foundation, bringing together 25 works that reflect the evolution of style, collecting, and the art market. Among the highlights is John Singer Sargent’s Group with Parasols (A Siesta) (1905), an early glimpse of the more personal, exploratory mode of expression that would come to characterize his later output. From Contemporary Art, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982) stands as a touchstone of the artist’s meteoric rise, revealing the immediacy and intensity that shaped a new visual language. Complementing these is Andy Warhol’s Orange Shot Marilyn (1982), a brilliant example of the artist’s enduring exploration of celebrity, desire, and the construction of myth. Also on view is the Lake Sentani Sculpture of a Female Ancestor from the storied collection of Helena Rubinstein, a work that speaks to the cross-cultural influences that shaped twentieth-century collecting, as well as Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Medusa Pendant, a rare, signed masterpiece that marked the genesis of Tiffany’s pioneering career in jewelry.

Seen together, these works turn to the central question of the project: what elevates an artwork from masterpiece to icon. Sometimes it is the breakthrough that defines an artist’s career, sometimes the cultural moment an object comes to represent, and sometimes the way a work enters collective memory through image, performance, or provenance. Some have shaped taste, some have shifted the market, and each reveals something essential about the creative ambition of its maker.

As we open the Breuer Building, this exhibition offers an opportunity to reflect on nearly three centuries of discovery, scholarship, and connoisseurship at Sotheby’s. Icons is both a celebration and a meditation. It invites visitors to look closely at the moments and masterpieces that have shaped our shared history, and to imagine the future we continue to build on Madison Avenue.