MOHAMMED AL RESAYES | BEDOUIN FAMILY II

Collection of the artist, Saudi Arabia

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner 

Mohammed Al Resayes began to paint and draw in 1973 in high school in Riyadh, before travelling to Cairo to further nurture his paintings abilities. At this stage he based his technique on a close study of the art of impressionist painters. He was attempting to integrate the brushstroke techniques of Impressionism with the contracted, reassembled space of Cubism, depicting sceneries reminiscent of his rural background.

In the 1990s, Al Resayes became involved with the emergent expressionist movement of the Saudi pioneers who preceded him. On his return to Riyadh, he worked at the King Saud University as an art teacher, and became the president of the Art Department a few years later. Among the large-scale paintings on which he worked are Waiting for The End (1985), Falcon and Spindle (1985) and his series Architectural Elements (1982), which all revolve around exile, pain and misery. The style of his works, particularly the composition of figures in space in Borrowed from Tradition (1980), owed much to the cubic style.

Like many of his contemporaries, beyond his thrive to contribute in the building of the Saudi art stage, Al Resayes spent his life developing an aesthetic sensitivity and vision out of the diverse range of abstract influences that challenged artists of his era. In the 1980s he constructed a private mythical world, pouring into the canvas his acute awareness of the ongoing debate that opposed tradition to modernity, in his attempt to conciliate the everlasting and the transitory. Towards the end of his career, his style met a radical shift and evolved into single dark images embedded in a morass of obscure paint, confounding the Saudi art stage with a new figurative style and a personal iconography.