Mohammed al Saleem

Mohammed al Saleem was born in 1939 in the town of Marat, in the Najd region of Saudi Arabia. He was schooled locally by Egyptian teachers who encouraged his early interest in calligraphy, and he began his working life as an art educator, teaching art and helping develop art curricula in Saudi Arabia. In 1970 he was awarded a Saudi government scholarship to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy, where he earned a diploma in decoration. His family reportedly joined him there in 1971, though this detail could not be independently corroborated; he lived and studied in Italy for roughly three years before returning to Saudi Arabia. One account gives 1973 as his graduation year.

Back in Saudi Arabia, al Saleem became, in 1967, the first artist to hold a solo exhibition in the city of Riyadh, and he went on to show in dozens of solo and group exhibitions in Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam, Cairo, Florence, Paris, and Washington. In 1979 he founded Dar Alfnoon, which the institution describes as Saudi Arabia's first independent art house, and he was also involved in designing public sculpture in Riyadh. He died in 1997 in Prato, Italy. No source consulted gives an exact day or month of death, only the year and the city.

Institutional and market sources consistently frame al Saleem as a foundational figure in Saudi visual art. Desert X AlUla describes him as one of the pioneering founders of the modern visual arts movement in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and among the earliest artists to shape a contemporary Saudi visual identity rooted in the local landscape. ArtCentron has called him the Father of Saudi Modernism for his development of Horizonism. No verbatim quotation from the artist or from a named critic in a major outlet could be independently confirmed for this profile.

Al Saleem's market accelerated sharply and recently. His previous auction high of about USD 91,000, set at Sotheby's in 2019, was overtaken in October 2023 when a 1986 untitled painting inspired by the Riyadh skyline sold at Sotheby's 20th Century Art / Middle East sale in London for approximately USD 1.1 million, seven times its pre-sale estimate. Arab News and other outlets describe this as the first time any Saudi artist crossed USD 1 million at auction. On 22 October 2024, Christie's London sold a 1990 work, Bi nur al-iman, nara al-sa'adah (In the Light of Faith, We See Happiness), for GBP 630,000, about USD 810,000, a strong result that nonetheless remained below the 2023 record. His work has since appeared as a centerpiece lot in Sotheby's Origins II sale in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia, in 2026. There is no catalogue raisonne. Authentication runs through the artist's estate and Dar Alfnoon Saudia.

Al Saleem's market is young and thin relative to his historical importance. His entire public auction record above the seven-figure mark dates to October 2023 or later, so pricing history for his top tier of work is short, and individual results can move a great deal on the strength of a single sale. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and the certificates associated with the artist's estate and Dar Alfnoon Saudia deserve close attention. His most significant recent institutional validation, including the Royal Commission for the City of Riyadh's 2022 acquisition of seven monumental sculptures and their exhibition at Desert X AlUla, sits in public and quasi-governmental hands rather than in a conventional gallery-driven market, which is a further reason to treat any single auction data point with care.