Ahmed Mater

Athr Gallery, Jeddah 
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2011

Stephen Stapleton, Edge of Arabia; Contemporary Art from The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, London 2012, pp. 160-161, illustrated 

This work is in very good condition. The catalogue illustration fails to convey the fluorescent nature of the neon lights.
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Ahmed Mater is Saudi Arabia's most prolific artist of his generation, having established himself as a pioneering figure of the Saudi Contemporary art scene. Born into a military family in Tabuk in 1979, Mater spent his childhood studying in a Quranic group and helping his family on a farm. When he was fifteen, Mater and his family moved to Aseer, where he went to high school, and began studying medicine alongside the Al Methaf Arts Village.

In 1999, experimenting with new subjects, Mater played with both traditional and experimental painting and he also took up photography, which he had not been exposed to as a child . In time and growing interest, Mater began taking aerial shots of Aseeri villages and by 2003 he was integrating x-rays of himself, his parents and his patients – into his paintings. The x-ray series brought Ahmed Mater to the forefront of the art scene, especially in 2004 where Mater exhibited his x-ray series in a controversial group show in Jeddah that heralded a formation of the artist collective Shatta, which also included Abdulnasser Gharem and Sahraf Fayadh. This exhibition marked the first opportunity to gauge the development of a contemporary art scene in Saudi, supported by the critical mass of a younger generation.

Stephen Stapleton, co-founder (with Mater and Gharem) of Edge of Arabia, a not-for-profit social enterprise devoted to fostering the dialogue between the Middle East and western world, writes of Mater and his work in 2010: "A boy stands on the flat, dusty rooftop of his family’s traditional house in the south west corner of Saudi Arabia. With all his reach he lifts a battered TV antenna up to the evening sky. He moves it slowly across the mountainous horizon, in search of a signal from beyond the nearby border with Yemen, or across the Red Sea towards Sudan. He is searching, like so many of his generation in Saudi, for ideas, for music, for poetry–for a glimpse of a different kind of life.

"His father and brothers shout up from the majlis (sitting room) below, as music fills the house and dancing figures appear on a TV screen, filling the evening air with voices from another world. 'This story says a lot about my life and my art' [Ahmed says to Stapleton] as he installs a bright, white neon antenna into the ceiling of a warehouse gallery in Berlin. [Mater says] 'I catch art from the story of my life. I don’t know any other way.'

"Ahmed Mater is the boy with the antenna; a young explorer in search of contact with the outside world, reaching out to communicate across the borders that surround him. It is this spirit of creative exploration and curiosity that defines Ahmed’s journey as an artist."