A yellow and blue Mark Rothko painting will headline Sotheby’s inaugural sales at its new space in Hong Kong in November, an ultra-rare instance of the Abstract Expressionist’s work being offered at auction in Asia.

Untitled (Yellow and Blue), from 1954, will appear in a Modern and contemporary art auction on November 8 at Sotheby’s Maison, a 24,000-square-foot retail and exhibition venue that the house opened in July in the Landmark Chater mall in the city’s Central district. The work is the first Rothko oil painting offered at auction in Asia. It has a presale estimate in the region of $30 million to $45 million and will be on view at the Maison from Friday through September 25.

This is not the first time that Untitled (Yellow and Blue), which resembles an inverted Ukrainian flag, has appeared at auction. The oil painting, measuring about 8 feet tall and 6 feet wide, fetched $46.5 million at Sotheby’s in New York in 2015, according to the Artnet Price Database. At the time, the work was estimated at $40 million to $60 million. (Final prices include fees; estimates do not.) The Rothko consignment was just finalized, Artnet has learned.

Sotheby’s originally planned to stage its Hong Kong sales next week, coinciding with arch-rival Christie’s inaugural sales on September 26 and 27 at its new Asia headquarters in the Henderson building, a few blocks away from the Maison.

But the auction house quietly postponed the sales to November, the Artnet Pro newsletter The Asia Pivot reported on Wednesday. Sources familiar with the house’s operations said that it was having difficulty securing consignments for the sales. However, a spokesperson for the house said in an email that it shifted the sales “to capitalize on the significant number of visitors we have seen coming through the doors of Sotheby’s Maison since its opening.”

Untitled (Yellow and Blue) has a fascinating provenance, which tracks the changing fortunes of the world’s rich and powerful. It was first acquired by the American philanthropists Paul and Bunny Mellon around 1970–71, soon after the painter’s suicide. It was later sold privately to French luxury mogul Francois Pinault, the billionaire owner of Christie’s, according to Sotheby’s.

In 2013, the painting became one of many artworks acquired by Jho Low, the fugitive Malaysian financier allegedly involved in a massive money-laundering scheme that was exposed in 2016. Sotheby’s got the work for sale in 2015 because it was used as collateral for a loan by Low. (At the time, the auction house was still public; it was acquired and taken private by Patrick Drahi in 2019.)

The buyer of the painting at Sotheby’s in 2015 was none other than Azerbaijani-Russian billionaire Farkhad Akhmedov, whose subsequent divorce became tabloid fodder.

Prices for Rothko have slipped in recent years. Last year, casino magnate Steve Wynn tried for months to sell his Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange), starting at Art Basel with the asking price of $60 million. The 1955 canvas eventually landed at Christie’s, fetching $46.4 million on November 9. A day earlier, a somber, untitled 1958 Rothko from the collection of the late collector Emily Fisher Landau disappointed at Sotheby’s, fetching $22.2 million against a low estimate of $30 million.

Rothko paintings are not often seen in commercial contexts in Asia, though they have been exhibited from time to time in previews of New York and London auctions and they have made rare appearances in gallery shows, like “Correspondence: Lee Ufan and Mark Rothko,” now at Pace Gallery in Seoul.

The last time a Rothko painting was offered at auction in Asia was in 2022, at Sotheby’s Hong Kong. The far smaller work (about 24 by 18 inches), Untitled (Red and Orange on Salmon), an acrylic on paper laid on canvas from 1969, had a presale estimate of $5.5 million to $7 million but was withdrawn before the sale, according to the Artnet Price Database.