MOSCOW—Christie’s International is promoting interest in its fall auctions this year by sending 40 of its top lots to Moscow for the “highest profile exhibit this autumn,” Ellen Berkeley, Christie's director for business development in Europe, told Bloomberg.

Among the works being shown are a Warhol “Liz” expected to fetch upward of $25 million, a Rubens oil sketch estimated at about $12 million, and a Modigliani painting, Portrait du Sculpteur Oscar Miestchaninoff, priced at $25 million. Only a fraction of the 40 works will be exhibited in London, New York, and Hong Kong.

The offerings will be shown October 18–20 at an exhibition sponsored by the Russian State Library and ZAO Gazprombank, the banking arm of the Russian gas producer OAO Gazprom, and held at a 19th-century mansion owned by the library and across from the Kremlin.

With Russia in its ninth year of financial growth, reports Bloomberg, “the country's newly affluent entrepreneurs are purchasing art for reasons that range from financial investing to home decorating as well as from a desire to build a collection.”

Said Jussi Pylkkanen, president of Christie's Europe, "We're very keen to take non-Russian works of art to Moscow because we've seen the energy they've taken to these markets."