Mohammed AlSaleem

Abstract

Mohammed AlSaleem was a pioneering Saudi Arabian artist and one of the founders of the country's modern art movement. He is best known for developing a visual language he termed Horizonism (Al-Afakia), structured around the horizon of the central Arabian desert landscape, abstraction, and Arabic calligraphy. His compositions rely on horizontal extension, rhythmic lines, and a warm palette of bronzes and primary tones to convey the sun's intensity in the desert terrain. In 1967, he held one of the earliest art exhibitions in Riyadh. After studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, he returned to Saudi Arabia, where he subsequently worked as an art teacher, a set decorator for television productions, and also founded Dar Al-Funoon Al-Sa'udiyyah, an institution begun to organise art exhibitions, making it the first of its kind in the history of the Kingdom. His paintings and public sculptures remain significant in the formation of modern Saudi art.

Biography

Early life

Mohammed AlSaleem was born in 1939 in Marat, a town in the central region of Saudi Arabia, roughly an hour from Riyadh. He grew up in a modest household where early on he was made responsible for contributing economically to the family household. His father worked as a pearl diver and was frequently absent for extended periods, while AlSaleem worked as a shepherd in the desert surrounding Marat to supplement the family’s income. Despite the demands placed on him by these family responsibilities, he was still able to pursue a primary school education, where from an early age he showed exceptional drawing skills. The open horizons, shifting light, and expansive terrain of the central Arabian desert he encountered during his childhood returned later as recurring motifs in his artistic vocabulary.

Education and artistic formation

At the age of 20, in 1958, AlSaleem was hired as an art teacher, one of the earliest appointments of its kind in the Kingdom. In 1970 he received a government scholarship to study in Italy, becoming one of the first Saudis to pursue formal art education abroad. He enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, where he was exposed to modernist European art and various approaches to abstraction, graduating in 1973. This training gave AlSaleem a formal grounding in painting and composition, drawing him towards abstraction as a means of articulating landscape and atmosphere.

Professional career

AlSaleem had already begun exhibiting his work prior to travelling to Italy. He took part in an early exhibition in Riyadh at the Al-Nassr Football Club in 196—generally regarded as one of the first art exhibitions staged in the city. Upon returning to Saudi Arabia from Florence, he worked as a set decorator for Saudi national television and continued teaching art. In addition to his artistic practice, he began to contribute to the development of the institutional frameworks that subsequently came to support the visual arts in Riyadh, founding Dar Al-Funoon Al-Sa'udiyyah (Saudi Arts House)—one of the earliest private cultural spaces in the Kingdom exclusively dedicated to exhibitions and artistic exchange (officially inaugurated the following year by Prince Faisal bin Fahad Al-Saud)—in 1979. The institution housed an exhibition space, a meeting place for artists, and a supplier of art materials at a time when art supply stores were scarce. Dar Al-Funoon Al-Sa'udiyyah later expanded into what became known as the Riyadh International Gallery for Fine Arts.

Through this initiative, AlSaleem contributed not only as an artist but also as a cultural organiser, supporting the emergence of a local fine art community during the formative decades of Saudi modernisation. He also produced a series of public sculptures for Riyadh municipality during the 1980s, including works titled Flower Bud, The Triangles, AlShuruf Unit, Al Ahilla, and The Thorn—each featuring symbolic geometric motifs drawn from the desert environment. In the final years of his career he returned to Florence, discouraged by the Saudi art scene’s slowdown during the 1990s, where he resided until his death in 1997. His daughter Najla AlSaleem, also an artist, has worked to preserve and promote her father's legacy, including efforts to restore Dar Al-Funoon.

Artistic approach and themes

AlSaleem is best known for Horizonism (Al-Afakia), a term he developed to describe his thematic exploration of the horizon line, one of the central structural and conceptual elements in his work. The horizon functions in his Horizonism paintings as both a compositional axis and a symbolic device suggesting continuity and spatial infinity. Rather than depicting the desert naturalistically, AlSaleem abstracted it by painting horizontal bands in a limited palette of colours inspired by typical desert light, evoking the linear encounter of earth with sky. Many works feature thick, textured applications of paint, resulting in a patterned surface. His use of colour transitions gradually from one band to the next, generating a sense of depth and atmosphere without representing specific objects or scenes.  At times he integrated Arabic calligraphy into the composition, replacing literal representations of desert topography. In the later stages of his career, he simplified his compositions further, reducing the landscape to broad areas of colour that still evoke the physical experience of being situated in desert space.

Through Horizonism, AlSaleem created a modern visual language grounded in the environment of central Arabia, contributing to a distinctly personal approach to the genre within the context of Middle Eastern modernism. He is thus widely regarded, alongside artists such as Abdulhalim Radwi and Safeya Binzagr, as one of the founding figures of the Saudi modern art movement.

Legacy and institutional context

AlSaleem's career developed in parallel with the broader institutional expansion of the arts in Saudi Arabia. The Institute of Art Education was established in Riyadh in 1965, and the Saudi Arabian Society for Culture and Arts was inaugurated in 1973, later opening branches throughout the Kingdom to provide artists with an exhibition platform. AlSaleem took part in exhibitions organised with the cooperation of these emerging structures during the 1970s and 1980s, alongside contemporaries who were similarly working to establish the country’s artistic infrastructure. His founding of Dar Al-Funoon can be understood within this context as one of several parallel efforts, both governmental and private, to provide Saudi artists with access to exhibition space, materials, and an audience.

AlSaleem's paintings have been included in retrospective surveys of early Saudi modernism and his sculptures produced for the Riyadh municipality remain part of the city's public art heritage.

Bibliography

Dar Alfnoon. "Our Work." Dar Alfnoon: Saudi Art House. https://daralfnoon.com/our-work/.

Ayad, Myrna. "Remembering Mohammed Al-Saleem: One of the Truest, Most Committed and Selfless Artists I Know." The National News, November 29, 2020.

"Mohammed Al Saleem." Ocula. https://ocula.com/artists/mohammed-al-saleem/.

"The Saudi Artists Who Paved the Way." Ithra, April 15, 2020. https://www.ithra.com/en/news/saudi-artists-who-paved-way.

"The Making of Modern Saudi Art." KSA Art. https://www.ksaart.com/the-making-of-modern-saudi-art/.

"Desert X AlUla: Art in the Saudi Desert." Rama Toshi Arya's Blog. https://ramaarya.blog/2026/04/20/saudi-arabia-desert-x-alula-2026/.

Further Readings

Porter, Venetia. Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East. London: British Museum Press, 2006.

Bardaouil, Sam, and Till Fellrath. That Feverish Leap into the Fierceness of Life: A Look at Five Artist Groups in Five Arab Cities Across Five Decades. Dubai: Art Dubai Modern, with the supported of  Misk Art Institute, 2018.

Shabout, Nada. Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.