Mona Saudi

Mona Saudi was born on 1 October 1945 in Amman, Jordan. She attended Zain Al-Ashraf School in Amman for her primary education, then completed her final high school year at a boarding school in Aley, in the mountains outside Beirut, after her brother encouraged her to finish her schooling in Lebanon. While in Beirut she held her first exhibition, at Café de la Presse, before leaving for Paris in February 1964.

In Paris she enrolled in the sculpture section of the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, joining in 1964 and training in the Atelier Colamarini, where she learned carving. In 1967 she spent several months working with marble in Carrara, Italy. Sources differ on the exact year she completed her formal studies, citing 1971, 1972, or 1973, but all agree she earned a degree in fine arts from the school in the early 1970s.

Saudi went on to develop an abstract, biomorphic vocabulary in limestone, marble, and diorite, work she described in terms of a "geometry of the soul," linking pared-down organic forms to themes of fertility, growth, and nature. Her sculpture Spiritual Geometry (also known as Geometry of the Soul) has stood on the esplanade of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris since 1987. She received Jordan's National Honorary Award for the Arts from King Hussein in 1993, and major retrospectives followed at Darat al Funun in Amman in 1995, The Mosaic Rooms in London in 2010, and Sharjah Art Museum, in collaboration with Sharjah Art Foundation, in 2018.

She spent most of her working life in Beirut, where she was also known as a publisher and cultural organizer. Mona Saudi died in Beirut on 16 February 2022, at the age of 76. Her death was confirmed publicly by her daughter, Dia al-Battal, and by her gallery, Lawrie Shabibi; the cultural journal Al Jadid reported that she died of cancer.

Saudi is consistently described in museum and gallery texts as a pioneer, one of the earliest Arab women sculptors to train and exhibit internationally, and a key figure in the cultural circle that made Beirut a regional hub for modern Arab art in the 1960s and 1970s. Her inclusion in the British Museum's "Feminine Power" exhibition, and her presence in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Institut du Monde Arabe, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and Sharjah Art Foundation, reflects a critical and curatorial consensus that treats her stone abstraction as both formally rigorous and historically significant to the story of Arab modernism. No single widely reproduced critical verdict on her work could be confirmed to exact wording from the available sources, so none is quoted here.

Mona Saudi's auction market is small and largely regional, concentrated in Middle Eastern art sales in London, Paris, and Dubai. Her current auction high is Naissance, a 1973 stone sculpture, which sold for EUR 142,000 at Artcurial in Paris on 27 November 2024. An earlier benchmark had been set at Christie's London, where her sculpture Shajarat al-Hayat (Tree of Life) sold for GBP 107,950 as part of a sale of the Dalloul Collection of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art. Her market is supported by gallery representation on two fronts: Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai, which represents her estate and has staged solo presentations at fairs including Art Dubai and Artissima, and Saleh Barakat Gallery/Agial Art Gallery in Beirut, which has mounted solo shows of her sculpture and works on paper.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Mona Saudi, so provenance and attribution rely on the artist's estate and on her two representing galleries, Lawrie Shabibi and Saleh Barakat Gallery. Her auction record is modest in absolute terms and built on a small number of sales, which means results can move a great deal based on the specific piece, its date, and its size rather than tracing a stable trend line. Her deepest source of value is institutional: broad museum representation across the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, and a documented role in the history of Arab modern art, both of which matter more to long-term standing than any single auction result.