A work by Monir Farmanfarmaian titled Zahra's Image (2009) is the lead lot of a sale of Arab, Iranian and Turkish art at Christie's Dubai on March 18.

It's valued at $350,000-500,000.

Monir Farmanfarmaian is one of Iran's leading contemporary artists

Farmanfarmaian is one of Iran's most important living artists. During the 1940s and 1950s she studied in New York, where she became friends with some of the key figures of that era - including Andy Warhol (with whom she collaborated) and Jackson Pollock.

She returned to her home country in the 1970s, but was forced to flee during the revolution of 1979. Much of her work was destroyed during this time.

The auction house describes the work as "a shimmering installation in the shape of an hexagon, is an exceptional study to a larger and major six-panel mirror mosaic work entitled Lightning for Neda - as a reference to the heroic act of bravour of a civilian named Neda during the 2009 Green Movement in Iran…

"It epitomises the artist's distinctive approach to geometric abstraction and her fascination with the concepts of repetition and progression, merged with the aesthetic traditions of Islamic architecture and cultural heritage as well as American Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism."

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