The Visual Arts Commission announced the opening of the exhibition, Bedayat: Beginnings of the Saudi Art Movement, on 27 January at the Saudi National Museum in Riyadh, where it will remain on view through 11 April.
Tracing the emergence of modern art in the Kingdom, the exhibition explores the formative generations of artists closely, particularly focusing on the decades between the 1960s and the 1980s. Artists of that time worked amid profound social and economic transformation. With little institutional support, but a clear commitment to exploration, these artists’ experiments in form and expression laid the foundations of Saudi Arabia’s visual culture at a moment when the country itself was being reshaped.
The exhibition aims to make Saudi’s artistic heritage accessible to both the public and scholars. It also serves as the cornerstone of a broader, research-led initiative to map and preserve the history of Saudi art, when the contours of a modern movement first began to take shape.
The research has drawn on extensive fieldwork, including dozens of site visits and interviews with artists and cultural figures who were active during those early years. It also traces how Saudi artists drew on international modernism while remaining connected to local traditions, creating visual languages shaped by both global ideas and daily life.
The artist’s stories help reconstruct a period defined by limited exhibition venues, and the growth of an artistic community depended largely on individual initiative and the informal networks artists built for themselves.
The exhibition will also present a mix of artworks and archival materials that chronicle the early development of modern and abstract art in the Kingdom. The collection, which includes painting and sculpture, many of which are on public view for the first time, offers a rare glimpse into a formative era, according to the organizers.
Organized into three sections, the show opens with the roots of the modern art movement before expanding to explore the wider artistic concerns of the period. It closes by spotlighting four influential artists who helped define the visual language of Saudi Arabia in its early modern phase, such as the painter Mohammed Al-Saleem, visual artist Safeya Binzagr, painter and mixed-media artist Mounirah Mosly, and sculptor Abdulhalim Radwi.
The initiative began with the exhibition, yet it unfolds through several integrated outputs, with the release of a comprehensive publication following the exhibition, an original documentary film, and a digital archive to expand documentation and access to knowledge of the Kingdom’s artistic history.
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