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Saudi Arabia is Dominating London’s Summer Art Season

The world’s leading fine art auction houses, Christies and Sotheby’s, are both hosting major exhibitions showcasing Saudi art.

Scene Now Saudi
Aug 16, 2024
Saudi Arabia is Dominating London’s Summer Art Season

Christie’s and Sotheby’s, the world’s leading fine art auction houses, dominate the global art world. For more than 200 years, they have acted as arbiters of taste and shapers of the market. They sell every luxury item imaginable, from a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 1945, with a price tag of half a million dollars, to French Impressionist masterpieces. However, it is in modern and contemporary art, exemplified by Christie’s 2021 sale of an NFT by digital artist Beeple for USD 69 million, that Christie’s and Sotheby’s have left their strongest mark.

London, along with Paris and New York, has long been a bastion of the art world establishment where collectors from around the globe flock to see the latest hot shows. This summer, however, the art world’s latest craze is modern and contemporary Saudi Art, with both auction houses hosting major exhibitions showcasing local artists.

Lasting until August 22nd, Christie’s St. James’s showroom is hosting a landmark mid-career retrospective of the work of pioneering multi-disciplinary artist Ahmed Mater. “Through ‘Ahmed Mater: Chronicles’ we invite collectors, clients and visitors to London to explore the rich and diverse art history of Saudi Arabia” Marie-Claire Thijsen, Head of Sale of Modern & Contemporary Middle Eastern art at Christies, tells SceneNowSaudi. “It has enabled us to showcase a leading Saudi artist at a time when London is an international destination for clients from the region and beyond”.

Just down the road, Sotheby’s has just launched its ‘Khamseen’ exhibition, which will run until August 30th, chronicling the last 50 years of Saudi art and featuring over 60 works. The exhibitions speak to the art world’s excitement about Saudi Arabia’s flourishing and once-underground art scene.

“I think there is a huge opportunity not just for Sotheby’s but for auction houses, galleries, and the market in general in the Kingdom,” elucidated Alexandra Roy, Head of Sale, Modern & Contemporary Middle East at Sotheby’s, in an interview with SceneNowSaudi. “There is a super young audience that is excited about what is happening in the Saudi art world and about being able to buy artwork represented somewhere like Sotheby’s London. I am sure we will see the market grow, but the commercial side cannot stand on its own. It needs to rely on the academic side, institutions, museums, exhibitions and biennales.”

For years, Saudi Arabia lacked such institutions, but this had not always been the case. In the 1950s and 1960s, supported by government scholarships and state-sponsored exhibitions, a new generation of Saudi artists emerged. Everything changed in 1979 when the government, responding to the Islamic revolution in Iran, adopted a much more conservative domestic agenda. Despite the obstacles, Saudi artists like Ahmed Mater were not deterred, and a small yet dynamic art scene developed, sustained by a handful of private collectors like Qaswra Hafez and galleries such as Athr and Art Jameel.

However, despite the best efforts of Saudi galleries, great artistic movements and centres require powerful institutional patrons. Without the Medici, Florence would not have become the home of the Italian Renaissance, nor would Baghdad have been a great centre of Islamic learning without the court of the Abbasid caliphs.

The Saudi government recognizes that art can enrich a society not just culturally but also materially as a multibillion-dollar industry. As such, it has placed art and culture at the forefront of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 initiative to diversify the country’s economy away from oil. In recent years, the government has announced a slate of projects, from the launch of the Diriyah’ Contemporary Art and Jeddah’s Islamic Art Biennales to a host of new art museums and public galleries. The hope is that these new institutions, combined with initiatives to support Saudi artists such as the creative art district JAX and the Minsk Art Institute in Riyadh, will pave the way for a commercial art market in the Kingdom similar to that in neighbouring UAE.

“Those in the Ministry of Culture understand that you can’t just manufacture a market. It has to be real and supported by collectors,” Princess Aila al Senussi, Senior Advisor to the Saudi Ministry of Culture and granddaughter of the last King of Libya, tells SceneNowSaudi. “You need to cultivate the building blocks first, and Saudi Arabia is very lucky that they already have the initial, most important foundation stone: the artists. If you support your artists and those foundational elements of a cultural community, you can then think about the next steps.”

It appears that the government’s strategy is paying off. Both exhibitions showcase work by Saudi artists whose work, in recent years, has had growing commercial traction. In 2023, a 1986 piece by Mohammed al Saleem broke a world record for any Saudi artist, selling for USD 1.1 million at a Sotheby’s 20th Century Middle East Art Sale—soaring above his previous record of USD 91,000.

Prices for Ahmed Mater’s work have also been steadily growing at auction, with bids from private and public collectors driving sales at auction well above estimates. in June 2023, Christie’s successfully auctioned Ahmed Mater’s 'Magnetism (Triptych)' in London for £189,000, setting a new record for the artist at auction.” Dr Ridha Moumni, Chairman of Christie’s Middle East & Africa and curator of “Ahmed Mater:Chronicles”, tells SceneNow Saudi” We are witnessing a growing regional and international interest in Saudi modern and contemporary art, which has significantly enhanced these artists' exposure and market value.

However, the significance of the exhibitions, which are free and open to the public, goes beyond the rarified art world by introducing a wider international audience to the Saudi art scene. Many in the West still have a rather gloomy impression of Saudi Arabia as culturally stifled and socially repressive. Saudi artists subvert these stereotypes, creating a platform for the rest of the world to engage with Saudi Arabia’s rich and textured culture.


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