Abdul Halim Radwi: pioneer of Saudi modernism

The year Federico Fellini made La Dolce Vita, a young student from Mecca arrived in Rome on a one-way ticket. Abdul Halim Radwi was determined to study art, a pursuit that in 1960 was considered unconventional in the social and religious climate in Saudi Arabia. ‘He had $80 in his pocket and could not speak Italian,’ says the artist’s son, Majdi Radwi. ‘His family thought he was mad.’

Things started to go wrong immediately. He was rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts and, within months, was bartering drawings for food and clothing. ‘He had won prizes in Mecca, but no one in Rome was interested,’ says Majdi. It took a fellow student to explain the problem: ‘Stop drawing with the eye of a camera and start drawing with the eye of an artist.’

Surrounded by classical antiquity, Radwi had not fully appreciated that 1960s Rome was experiencing one of the most fertile periods in Italian art and cinema. There was glamour in the films of Fellini and Luchino Visconti, and grit in the politically astringent work of Arte Povera artists Michelangelo Pistoletto and Mario Merz. ‘My father suddenly realised that classical depictions of trees and houses were of little interest to these modernists,’ says Majdi. He abandoned realism in favour of distilling his inner visions onto canvas. The transformation was swift: within months, Radwi had been accepted into the academy.

Today, Abdul Halim Radwi is regarded as one of the founding figures of Saudi modernism. His evocative paintings, sometimes described as a form of prismatic imagery or Expressionism, are rooted in both Middle Eastern and Western artistic traditions. They are rich in symbolism and iconography and reveal the artist’s ambition to create a distinctly Saudi visual language inspired by the kingdom’s landscape, architecture and mythology.

He is perhaps best known for his cityscapes: fragmented, abstracted impressions that reflect on the profound transformations experienced by Saudi Arabia over the past 70 years. To appreciate the scale of that change, one need only compare photographs of his birthplace, Mecca, in the 1950s with the city as it appears today.

Offered for private sale at Christie’s is a dreamlike cityscape by Radwi from 1989. Titled Arts and Melody, it visually translates sound into colour. Goethe once declared that architecture was ‘frozen music’, and in Radwi’s painting, architecture and abstraction are synthesised into a timeless state.

Radwi was born in 1939. His father died when he was seven years old, leaving his mother to raise the family. ‘My grandmother had studied in India and was highly educated,’ says Majdi. ‘She taught my father to believe in his dream.’ It was a tough upbringing, however, and Radwi worked as a street performer to make money for the family. ‘I think that is where he got his determination from,’ says Majdi.

After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and later the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, Radwi became associated with an art that was distinctly Saudi in character. His expressive forms found an appreciative audience in Italy, in Spain and in Lebanon, where he had several exhibitions, but there was little interest within Saudi Arabia. ‘His first solo exhibition in Saudi Arabia (Jeddah), in 1962, was a failure — no one came,’ Majdi recalls.

Fortunately, there were people within the kingdom who recognised his talent, notably the future mayor of Jeddah, Mohammed Said Farsi, and in 1968, Radwi was made director of Jeddah’s Centre for Fine Arts. The institution became a focal point for upcoming painters such as Mohammed Al Saleem. ‘My father was a generous, compassionate person,’ says Majdi. ‘He had been all alone in Italy, he understood how hard it was. He wanted to be a support to other artists.’

By the 1980s, Radwi had become one of the kingdom’s most respected artists, and he was commissioned to make public sculptures for Jeddah’s famous corniche, including his first sculpture, Poetry Garden (1969), and a sandstone work from 1981 recently rediscovered during the restoration of Jeddah’s historic quarter. However, it was a painting created in 2002, on the eve of the second Iraq War, that captured the attention of the future king, HRH Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

Untitled is composed of multicoloured concentric circles surrounding the image of a dove. According to Majdi, the dizzying kaleidoscopic effect was intended to capture the destabilising sense of uncertainty at a time of extreme political conflict.

It was precisely this tension that resonated with the future King Salman, who interpreted the painting as an allegory on leadership itself. ‘He wrote a letter to my father saying that the painting embodied the emotional and moral weight carried by rulers in times of crisis,’ says Majdi.

Untitled is offered in Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art Online until 16 June 2026. More than two decades after its creation, the painting remains remarkably relevant. In his lifetime, Radwi took his inspiration from the Arabic Peninsula, while remaining alert to radical experiments in international art. As geopolitical tensions rise again, Radwi’s painting echoes across the decades, and across geographical and generational boundaries.

Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art Online is on view until 11 June 2026 at Christie’s in London