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30 March 2024

Saudi artists set for boom as global interest rises

A woman looks at 'Concrete' by Saudi Arabian artist Abdulnasser Gharem at an exhibition set by Christie's in Dubai on April 26, 2009. (AFP)

Published
By Henry Meyer

Saudi Arabian artist Abdulnasser Gharem sold his first work at auction for $8,700 (Dh31,929) in Dubai last year. In March, at Art Dubai, another of his pieces, made from rubber stamps, was bought by an Emirati collector for $50,000.

"If you compare me with these guys at Art Dubai, most of them are dinosaurs," Gharem, 35, said in an interview in the Saudi capital Riyadh. "This means we have something important and different in art."

Saudi art, still little known outside the kingdom, is starting to get international attention after a group of artists exhibited in London in 2008 and at last year's Venice Biennale. More shows are planned this year in Berlin and Istanbul. Inside the country, art galleries are rare because of religious objections to depicting the human form in paintings or sculptures.

The government-supported drive to promote Saudi artists on the global stage, part of a strategy by King Abdullah to rebrand his state as investor-friendly, comes at a time when prices for artworks from the oil-rich Gulf country remain relatively low.

"There is a group of artists in Saudi Arabia, some of whom will probably do quite well in the future," said William Lawrie, a Dubai-based expert on Middle Eastern art at Christie's International. The London-based auction house in April 2009, for the first time offered for international auction a collection of Saudi art in Dubai. It sold six Saudi artworks for about $64,000.

At the Hewar Art Gallery on the 52nd floor of the glass Kingdom Tower skyscraper in Riyadh, General Manager Mohammad Al Sa'awy was showing around a potential South Korean buyer.

"Saudi art is still the cheapest in the region," he said, pointing at an oil painting by Abdullah Hammas, an artist born in 1952, on sale for $5,000. On the opposite wall, similar-quality works by contemporary artists from Lebanon and Syria were priced at $20,000.

That may change as Saudi collectors start to invest in art from their home country, in the same way as Iranian-born buyers helped to drive up the prices of art from Iran in the past two decades, said Al Sa'awy. An artist from Iran, Parviz Tanavoli, set a record in April 2008 for Middle East art prices when he sold a sculpture, The Wall (Oh, Persepolis), for $2.84 million at auction in Dubai. Saudi Arabia, the largest Arab economy, has about a fifth of the world's oil reserves.

Mohammed Said Farsi, a former mayor of the Saudi Red Sea port city of Jeddah, who has amassed the largest collection of Egyptian modern art, on April 27 sold 25 of his several hundred Egyptian art works at Christie's in Dubai. One of them, Les Chadoufs by Mahmoud Said, set a record for a work of modern Arab art at auction, securing a price of $2.43m.

Basma Al Sulaiman, who is from a prominent Jeddah family and a Middle Eastern collector focused on international art, began acquiring works from India and China in the 1990s. Now she is also turning her attention to Saudi Arabia. Because most artists in Saudi Arabia lack a formal art education, due to an absence of fine-arts colleges in the country, "Saudi art is interesting and fresh," Al Sulaiman said by telephone from Shanghai. "They are experimenting with a lot of different ideas, not only oil painting, but photographs and conceptual art."

Gharem's works include a performance piece in which he stood for an entire day on a street in his home city of Abha next to a tree wrapped in plastic. He also daubed a section of road leading up to a collapsed bridge repeatedly with an Arabic word meaning "The Path".

Maha Malluh, a Riyadh-based artist, produces black-and-white photographic collages known as "photograms" by exposing them to light objects representing Saudi culture juxtaposed with modern items.

The artists are doing things "that are quite personal, related in some way to their own life experiences," said Lawrie from Christie's. Gharem, whose Men at Work features a soldier, is a serving officer in the Saudi armed forces and fought against Yemeni insurgents from November 2009 to February this year. Another artist, Ahmed Mater Al Ziad Aseeri, who is a doctor employed at a hospital in Abha, has some works that make use of medical X-rays.

In her studio, set in the courtyard of a spacious Riyadh villa, Malluh says she sees her role to bridge the divide between Saudi Arabia and the Western world. The artist, along with Gharem and others, is part of the "Edge of Arabia", a project mounted by British art specialist Stephen Stapleton to showcase contemporary Saudi art around the world.

"Most people don't know what the real Saudi Arabia is," she said. "The fascination is that they understand what we are saying now, we are talking the same language."

By increasing awareness about Saudi art both abroad and at home, the aim is to enable artists from Saudi Arabia to achieve recognition and success, said Sarah Al Faour, chief of arts and culture at the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority. It is one of two government agencies that partner with Edge of Arabia. "There's been an artistic boom in the Middle East generally, and there has been a lot of curiosity, a lot of attention from the international art market," she said. "There is a really big creative movement coming out of Saudi Arabia."