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DUBAI: Saudi artist Mohammed Al-Saleem broke a world record for Saudi artists this week during Sotheby’s 20th Century Art/Middle East sale in London.
The talent’s 1986 artwork – inspired by the skyline of Riyadh that radiates from the desert – coined $1.1 million, seven times its pre-sale estimate, and the world record for any Saudi artist at auction.
This 1986 untitled work, according to Alexandra Roy, the auction head, “essentially banishes form and landscape, reimagining the distant dunes of the desert horizon through contained slabs of color, which emerge as if struggling against one another across the surface of the image.
“Its layering and shading suggest a search for subtle accords and variations similar to that with which a composer achieves musical harmony, creating an astonishing sense of energy and dynamism.”
Al-Saleem’s previous record of $91,000 was set at Sotheby’s in 2019.
The sale presented a unique group of modernist works assembled by Shatha Ibrahim Al-Tassan, a prominent collector who founded the Hewar Art Gallery in Riyadh in 2006.
The collection contained several major works by Saudi modernists, including pieces by Mounirah Mosly, Abdul Jabbar Al-Yahya, Taha Al-Sabban, and Abdulrahman Al-Soliman, as well as pieces by significant Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian, Tunisian and Lebanese artists.
Al-Saleem was born in 1939 and became one of the leading artists of his generation, contributing greatly to the evolution of the Saudi art scene. His work often fused modernist abstraction with traditional elements from daily Saudi life.
Courtesy: arabnews
