Rashed Al Shashai

Rashed Al Shashai was born in 1977 in Al Baha, Saudi Arabia, and raised in Mecca. He earned a Master of Arts in Art Education, with a concentration in Plastic Arts, from Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca in 2010, after working for years as an artist and art educator. His practice uses found objects and everyday materials, assembled into what he has described as a semantic field addressing the impact of modernization, media, and consumer culture on the individual.

In 2009 he founded the Tasami Centre for Visual Arts in Jeddah, which he directed until 2014, and he is a founding member of both the Saudi Arabia Fine Arts Society and an association supporting art education in the kingdom. He has also been closely associated with the Madina Arts Centre in Al-Madinah, described in different sources as its director and, elsewhere, as an artistic consultant to it. In 2024 he opened Shashai Studio, an artist-run space in the JAX art district of Diriyah, inaugurating it with the solo exhibition Night and a Thousand Nights. Sources describe his base at different points as Jeddah and, more recently, Riyadh. As of 2026 he continues to work and exhibit in Saudi Arabia.

Coverage of Al Shashai in Saudi and regional art press consistently frames him as a leading conceptual voice in the country's contemporary art scene, crediting him with turning ordinary, found materials into installations that carry social and historical weight, including his lightbox-based works and his contribution to the Forever Is Now III exhibition staged at the Giza pyramids in 2023. Institutional recognition has tracked alongside his own institution-building: profiles from Ithra, SelectionsArts, and his galleries repeatedly cite his roles founding the Tasami Centre for Visual Arts and shaping art education bodies in Saudi Arabia as central to his standing, alongside his continued studio practice.

No confirmed public auction sale price for Rashed Al Shashai's work could be located as of 2026-07-18. Sotheby's has catalogued at least two of his works for sale, Heaven's Doors, an aluminium-board lightbox piece executed in 2013, and Untitled (Arabic Window), but no hammer or realized price for either is documented in available records. His commercial presence has run mainly through the primary market: a 2016 solo show, Salvation, at Ayyam Gallery's Dubai space, a 2015 solo show, Section 11, split between Hafez Gallery in Jeddah and Hewar Art Gallery in Riyadh, and an ongoing relationship with Hafez Gallery, Jeddah, which maintains a dedicated artist page for him, alongside his own Shashai Studio in Diriyah. His profile is otherwise built on biennial and museum-adjacent participation, including the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2021) and Noor Riyadh (2021 to 2022), rather than a track record of secondary-market sales.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Rashed Al Shashai, and no certificate-of-authenticity program was identified in available sources, so due diligence should run through his current gallery, Hafez Gallery in Jeddah, or his own Shashai Studio in Diriyah. His auction history is effectively undeveloped: the works that have appeared at Sotheby's carry no published price data, which means there is no reliable secondary-market benchmark to cite. His visibility instead rests on Saudi and Gulf institutional programming, including the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale and Noor Riyadh, and on his own role as a studio and center founder, which collectors should treat as evidence of cultural standing rather than as a substitute for auction-market depth.