Dia Aziz Dia


Dia Aziz Dia took his daily environment as the main subject of his representations and drawings. When first look at his work, one can see that the artist has put social life on record from a geographical perspective of both landscape and architecture, and through the observation of costumes, events, habits and customs. But a more thorough reading of his collection of works reveals that Dia's other obsession lies in capturing light and colour as the essential axes for the composition and structure of his paintings.

This is achieved by setting up an intense dialogue between both elements, in order to reflect the intensity of high amidst a nature that is overwhelmed by desert elements and continental climate characteristics.

Dia has patiently and persistently endeavoured to subdue his tools and techniques to endow plastic art with a long awaited presence within Saudi cultural life. Along with his fellow pioneering Saudi artists, Dia laid the foundation for anchoring art within the country's traditions and needs. He stands among the intellectuals who considered that studying, learning and diversifying research resources constitute the standards for deepening one's awareness and vision of local reality, once the artistic techniques and the rules of art itself have been mastered.

By publishing the present book and sponsoring its concomitant exhibition, the Al Mansouria Foundation for Culture and Creativity is setting forth the first of a series of publications dedicated to document the works of pioneering Saudi artists. The project aims at consolidating and dating Saudi plastic art forms that will constitute the core collection of a future national artistic resource intended to allow art to spread and grow, and become known to the largest audience possible.

It will provide reference tools for researchers, artists and viewers as well. We firmly believe, at the Al Mansouria Foundation, that through publishing such worthy books, we can contribute efficiently to the sustainability of artwork outside of exhibition halls and museums, so that art becomes accessible to art's lovers everywhere.

Al Mansouria

Zaman Jassim


Al Mansouria sponsors artistic experiences being as they are part of a nation's spiritual nourishment. Each and every genuine artistic experience is nothing less than the expansion of authenticity on one hand, and the intellectual and social stimulus on the other. It motivates both the artist and viewer to test their lasting beliefs and preconceived ideas, to cultivate and refine them by exposing them to discussion within a refutable and reconstructable modern structure. For art remains our most idealistic way to search for, and realize, the self within. Through its renewed and regenerated styles, art looks into exploring appearances and paradigms, thereby raising more questions in its quest for identity.

By supporting artists endowed with creative tools and visions, Al Manchuria seeks to open up the artist's horizon, freeing his space and encouraging him to evolve beyond limits and difficulties. Our endeavour is to provide the artist with the most appropriate and fertile environment to measure his experience against reality and its interference with it, along with his questioning of that reality.

Al Mansouria presents the experience of the artist Zaman Jassim, which originates from a vision of an inherited past that is deep-rooted in authenticity and joyfully tinted with the fringes of modernity, harmoniously mingling with the abstractions of our modern times. The artist holds to his contemporary, innovative, artistic expression without compromising his loyalty to his aspirations, nor departing from his deepest motivations and authentic roots. Zaman starts his journey with a carpet, a tent and a camel saddle, which are spaces woven with human toil and sweat, bearing the distinctive marks of a colourful and intellectual history, which parallels the desert's archives. The artist leaves those vast dimensions to join the desert with its openness on the absolute concealed in his colour, in its brightness, shades, subtle tide, vividness and abstraction .

Art, as viewed and propounded by Al Mansouria, is a tool for dealing with reality, a revolution against the monotonous vision of the surrounding environment. Freedom with its eternal values lies behind renewed vision. It is within such regenerative vision that human beings are revived, rooted and propelled.

Al Mansouria

Tradition and Modernity: Three generations of Saudi contemporary artists


The Al-Mansouria Foundation for Culture and Creativity is pleased and proud to lend some works of its renowned Saudi art collection to the exhibition, « Tradition et modernité : trois générations d’artistes contemporains saoudiens » (Tradition and Modernity: Three Generations of Contemporary Saudi Artists), organised by the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Paris, at the Town Hall of the smart city of Neuilly-sur-Seine, in the Greater Paris area, in celebration of the Saudi National Day. This important occasion gives us a great opportunity to fulfil one of the main goals of our institution, which was founded in 1999 to support creativity in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and to build bridges of communication between world’s cultures.

In our search and support for excellence and authenticity in Saudi art forms, we are committed to celebrate our unique Saudi perspective and to set up a dialogue with other cultures to share common ground within the global contemporary art movement. Through the acquisition of a studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts (International City of Arts) in Paris, in 2001, the foundation has encouraged Saudi and Arab artists to practice and work in Paris, the Capital of Art, in order to extend and enrich the scope of their artistic field of experience.

To exhibit works of major contemporary Saudi artists in Neuilly-sur-Seine will undoubtedly help those artists communicate directly with the French public, in a universal language that speaks about the past, the present and the future of the Saudi society, which still is, in many respects, unknown to many. The works of Safeya Binzagr reflect the profundity and the vitality with which the artist skilfully puts on record the history of the Saudi society, with authenticity and a remarkable diversity of colours. Light and colours also play a major role in the work of Dia Aziz Dia, which depicts scenes of ordinary life within Saudi society, with a particular stress on geographical and architectural dimensions. As for Faisal Samra, his work shows clearly his attempt to convey, in his own unique way, some specific sensory impressions stemming from a wealth of life experiences.

We sincerely hope that this exhibition will shed light on our Saudi society with its main constituents, its customs and its traditions, and pass on the most exalted humane message of friendship, tolerance and understanding, laying the foundations for an authentic dialogue.

The Al Mansouria Foundation for Culture and Creativity

Adam Henein


Descending from the ancient-most population along the banks of the Nile, Adam Henein has a just claim to the heritage of the Egypt of the Pharaohs, to its science of proportion and material, and to the long succession of builders and sculptors who built the pyramids, erected the obelisks and embellished the temples and tombs with bas-reliefs and statues.

Heir to this legacy, he is nonetheless highly modern in his artistic expression and very free in choosing his themes, which combine “noble” subjects with more familiar ones, often treated with humour. However this freedom – which is that of an accomplished artist – is also a reference to the past. Beneath the intentional simplicity of the lines, one discovers ancient Egypt: its ability to convey with equal elegance and force the image of the Pharaohs and of everyday objects; and beneath the density of the chosen materials – granite, bronze, sandstone, plaster, slate or wood – one encounters ancient Egypt once again, in its singular ability to confer the dashing energy of birds in flight to the most massive of forms.

Adam Henein seems to have assimilated the lesson of this great past early on. His calling as a sculptor was revealed to him at the age of eight when, with his schoolmates, he visited the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. After completing his studies at the Fine Arts Academy, he spent time in Luxor and Aswan, steeping himself in the strangely mineral landscapes, where it is not always easy to distinguish what was shaped by nature from what that which was transformed by human hands: cliffs and precipices no less angular than the pyramids; obelisks still lying dormant in their granite quarries, returning to their mother substance; humpbacked rocks of Elephantine, marked here and there by hieroglyphs, rising from the Nile like the backs of animals. From the starry heavens to the dark silt, everything blends and joins to weave a magic and seamless body. And it was there that the young man would learn another lesson, far more determinate than whatever he had gleaned at school.

In 1971, he travelled to Paris to take part in an exhibition of contemporary Egyptian art at the Galliera Museum. He had planned to stay about a year in the French capital before heading on to Mexico, where he had wanted to study pre-Columbian art, whose force and simplicity attracted him through its resonances with those of ancient Egyptian art and with his own artistic inclinations. But leaving Paris is no mean feat, and he ended up spending twenty-five years in the city, from 1971 to 1996. He visited the museums, met artists, worked feverishly – though in cramped conditions – in his fifteenth arrondissement studio, near Porte de Sèvres. His exhibitions met with success. He was drawn to Italy, travelling there frequently, both for pleasure and for research, particularly to Petrasanta, where he became friends with the caster Mariani.

By the time he returned to his homeland, Adam Henein was regarded as an artist of international renown and stature. Egypt provided him with the means and the breathing space which he needed. His knowledge of ore and carving techniques impressed those around him. Farouk Hosny, Egyptian Minister of Culture, put him in charge of overseeing the restoration of the Great Sphinx at Giza. Indeed, his immense studio in Harraniya was close at hand; prior to the very recent urban growth, his windows looked directly out onto the Pyramids. At any event, it was there that he was finally able to sculpt the monumental works that he had long dreamed of and to give form to his famous, nineteen metre-long, granite and bronze vessel. He did not, however, forget the Upper Egypt of which he was so fond; and in Aswan, he founded the International Sculpture Symposium, of which he is the curator. Each year, since the Symposium’s foundation, he has invited sculptors from all around the world, giving them the possibility to carve the pink or grey granite taken from the millennia-old, yet still active quarries.

Sculptor, Adam Henein is also a painter. As such, he has developed a pictorial technique close to his heart: painting on papyrus, using natural pigments, bound with gum arabic. It is not difficult to see the extent to which his painterly work – marked by the mineral makeup of the pigment – is influenced by his sculpture: the overlapping constructions of rectangular surfaces; the fleeting yet decisive indication of volumes and depths; the broad colour fields reinforcing a sense of spatiality.

Representative as he is of Egyptian art and its traditions, this prolific creator can by no means be circumscribed by Egypt alone. His work has for many years marked the artistic scene in the Arabic world as a whole. Thus, no sooner was the Al-Mansouria Foundation established than the idea of reproducing and publishing the work of Adam Henein appeared as a self-evidence. For almost three years, the Foundation has worked to compile, catalogue and photograph his sculptures, paintings, drawing and sketches – in short, everything that is in the hands of museums and private collectors and which comprises, more or less in extenso, the artist’s work to date.

The Al Mansouria Foundation for Culture and Creativity