Abdullah Hammas

Private Collection, Saudi Arabia (acquired directly from the artist in 1974)

Although Abdullah Hammas has long been celebrated as a central figure in twentieth-century art emerging from Saudi Arabia, the abstract works he created throughout his career have remained overlooked by critics and the public in favour of his representational subjects. In the mid-seventies, Hammas leaped into abstraction with a group of paintings that were among the most radical creations produced in the impermeable Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Graduating from the Riyadh Institute of Arts in 1973, Hammas taught art for the following three decades in the margin of his several solo exhibitions in Saudi Arabia, as well as in Paris and Rabat. Most of his work is held within public collections across the Middle East, Europe and the UK as he is considered one of the first painters to have challenged the limits of traditional and decorative painting in the Gulf, pioneering an artistic trajectory into abstraction that was imbued with a rooted sense of his homeland, with geometric shapes superseding the depiction of objects in promoting pure aesthetic feelings.

Like Malevich, Abdullah Hammas was interested in theosophy, and the mystical school of thought which promoted the belief that the real world was an illusion and that the tangible ‘real’ world existed ‘behind’, and the ‘reality’ one should be concerned with lays therefore beyond the physical reality. Unrestrained and spontaneous, with inspiration drawn from his surrounding architecture and the natural environment, Hamas sees his artistic contribution as “a brick in the wall of this great country.”

The organic forms of the early abstractions gave way to a rigorous geometricism.  Works executed in Riyadh were sharper in nature, whilst the later works produced in the Eastern coastal province of Al-Khobar are often brighter in colour with more distinct lines and organic forms at play. Hamas’s fundamental question was whether it was possible for his generation to paint not only the desert and the dunes, but the vital forces of a chilled evening breeze? Not the architecture of a mosque, but the sound of the azan too- opening a palette to the many forces, rays and oscillations yet to be discovered.  The multi-faceted aspect of symbolism contributes to the immense importance of Abstact VII within Hammas’s oeuvre: softly commanding and intensely subtle, Abstract VII is a wok of outstanding power and authority.