The fastest way to misunderstand Saudi contemporary art is to assume it began when the museums did. It did not. The artists were working, exhibiting internationally and entering major collections for a decade and more before the country built anywhere to show them, which is why the strongest work tends to be about absence, erasure and what gets built over.
What follows is not a ranking. It is the shortest set of names that lets you walk into a Gulf art fair and know what you are looking at.
Ahmed Mater
Born in Tabuk in 1979, and a practising physician, which is not a biographical curiosity — it is where the work comes from. Evolution of Man (2008) runs an X-ray sequence from a petrol pump to a man holding a gun to his head. Magnetism (2009) sets a black cuboid magnet in a field of iron filings that circle it exactly as pilgrims circle the Kaaba.
Magnetism exists as a photogravure of 2012 in the British Museum’s collection, acquired that year, and was shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Light from the Middle East across 2012 and 2013. Desert of Pharan, made between 2012 and 2017, documents the transformation of Mecca. Ashab Al-Lal, a land work in AlUla, followed in 2022. He is represented by Galleria Continua.
Start here. Mater is the artist who established that you could make work about the most sensitive subject in the country and be collected by the British Museum for it.
Manal AlDowayan
AlDowayan represented Saudi Arabia at the sixtieth Venice Biennale in 2024 with Shifting Sands: A Battle Song — large silk sculptures modelled on desert rose crystals, silkscreened with media commentary written about Saudi women, and developed through participatory workshops with Saudi women themselves. Curated by Jessica Cerasi and Maya El Khalil, commissioned by the Visual Arts Commission.
She had earlier shown Now You See Me, Now You Don’t at the inaugural Desert X AlUla in 2020. She is represented by Sabrina Amrani in Madrid.
The through-line in her work is who gets to speak and who gets spoken about, which makes a national pavilion an unusually pointed venue for it.
Abdulnasser Gharem
Gharem served as a lieutenant colonel in the Saudi army while making the most institutionally awkward art in the country, which is a combination with no obvious parallel anywhere.
The Path (Siraat) (2007) commemorates a village that took shelter on a concrete bridge during a flood; the bridge collapsed. Message/Messenger (2010) sold at Christie’s in 2011 for $842,500, at the time the highest auction price for a living Arab artist. Road to Makkah (2014) reproduces the motorway signage that sorts drivers by religious status. His first solo show in the United States, Pause, ran at LACMA from 16 April to 2 July 2017 with eleven works.
Muhannad Shono
Born in Riyadh in 1977 to Circassian migrant parents, with a degree in architecture from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals taken in 2000 — and it shows in work that is almost always about line, mark and material behaving on their own.
The Lost Path at Desert X AlUla in 2020. On Losing Meaning at the first Diriyah Biennale in 2021. The Teaching Tree for the Saudi pavilion at Venice in 2022. His work is held by the Centre Pompidou, the British Museum, Art Jameel and the Black Gold Museum in Riyadh. Represented by ATHR.
Maha Malluh
Born in Jeddah in 1959 and working in Riyadh, Malluh is the senior figure here and the one whose materials are most immediately legible.
Al-Muallaqat (2012) hangs blackened aluminium cooking pots in rows, named for the pre-Islamic Suspended Odes said to have hung at Mecca. Sky Clouds, made between 2009 and 2015, sets seven hundred black polyester gloves filled with sand on prayer rugs. The Food for Thought series has run since 2012; the Capturing Light photograms date to 2005.
She is represented by Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna and held by the British Museum, Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, SFMOMA and Louvre Abu Dhabi — where Food for Thought — Al Muallaqat hangs in the permanent collection. She showed at the fifty-seventh Venice Biennale in 2017, at the British Museum’s Hajj exhibition in 2012, and at the Saatchi Gallery in 2016.
Zahrah Al Ghamdi
Al Ghamdi grew up in the southwest and makes site-specific land work in clay, rock and leather — materials of the Asiri building tradition, handled as sculpture. She holds a degree in Islamic arts from King Abdulaziz University, and a master’s in contemporary craft and a doctorate from Coventry.
After Illusion was the Saudi pavilion at Venice in 2019. Glimpses of the Past was her commission for Desert X AlUla in 2020.
Dana Awartani
Saudi mother, Palestinian father, born and raised in Jeddah, trained at Central Saint Martins and then in Islamic geometry at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, with an ijaza in illumination earned in Turkey. That combination — contemporary art school plus a traditional licence to practise — is rare and it is the whole basis of the work.
Standing on the Ruins of Aleppo (2021) reproduces the tiled floor of the city’s Grand Mosque in unfired mud brick, which cracks as it dries. Standing by the ruins (2025) does the same for the Hamam al-Sammara in Gaza. She represents Saudi Arabia at the Venice Biennale in 2026, curated by Antonia Carver and Hafsa Alkhudairi, and is represented by Lisson Gallery.
Three more worth knowing
Rashed AlShashai showed A Concise Passage at Desert X AlUla in 2020 and is represented by Hafez Gallery in Jeddah. Nasser AlSalem showed Amma Qabel at the same edition; his practice reworks Arabic calligraphy into sculpture and installation. And Shadia Alem, with her sister the novelist Raja Alem, made The Black Arch for the first Saudi pavilion at Venice in 2011 — a black arch, a cubic city and a handful of Muzdalifah pebbles carried from Mecca.
Source: Z thomas, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Where the work is shown
The Venice pavilion. Saudi Arabia first exhibited at the fifty-fourth Biennale in 2011. Zahrah Al Ghamdi followed in 2019, Muhannad Shono in 2022, Manal AlDowayan in 2024, and Dana Awartani takes the fourth showing in the country’s permanent Arsenale space in 2026.
The Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale. Inaugurated in 2021, second edition in 2024 curated by Ute Meta Bauer, and a third — In Interludes and Transitions — running from 30 January to 2 May 2026 in the JAX District, with artistic directors Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed, more than seventy artists, over twenty new commissions and scenography by Formafantasma.
Desert X AlUla. The inaugural edition ran 31 January to 7 March 2020, curated by Raneem Farsi and Aya Alireza with Neville Wakefield as artistic director: fourteen artists, six of them Saudi.
The galleries. ATHR was founded in Jeddah in 2009 by Mohammed Hafiz and Hamza Serafi and now also runs spaces in AlUla and in Riyadh’s JAX District. Hafez Gallery was founded in Jeddah in 2014 by Qaswra Hafez, with a Riyadh space added in early 2024. Both are commercial galleries doing work that would elsewhere be done by institutions.
Read also: AlUla has a season, and it is only four months long
How to actually look at it
There is a temptation, with art from a country changing this fast, to read every work as a position statement about the country. Some of it is. Most of it is not, and the artists here have been notably resistant to being turned into evidence.
The better approach is the one the work invites: look at the materials. Mud that cracks as it dries. Cooking pots blackened by use. Iron filings held in orbit. Silk cut into desert roses. These are artists working with things that decay, migrate or hold a shape only under tension — which is a more interesting way of talking about a country in the middle of a transformation than any wall text would manage.
Featured Image Source: Twillyke, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
