Born in 1939 in Saudi Arabia’s rural province of Al-Marat, Mohammed Al Saleem emerged as one of the most influential pioneers of the Kingdom’s modern art movement. After his early years in his hometown, Al Saleem relocated to Riyadh, but his ambition and passion for art eventually led him abroad: in the early 1970s, he traveled to Italy to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, becoming among the first Saudi artists to receive formal European art education.

Upon his return to the Kingdom, Al Saleem’s influence on the local art scene became immediately tangible; in 1967, he held one of Riyadh’s very first solo exhibitions at a t.mes when the Kingdom’s artistic infrastructure was gradually developing. In 1979, he founded Dar Al Funoon Al-Sa’udiyyah, which was inaugurated in 1980 under the patronage of Prince Faisal bin Fahad Al-Saud and acted as the Kingdom’s first multipurpose creative space, offering a venue for exhibitions, and even supplying art materials to emerging artists. Alongside the Dar Al Funoon Al-Sa’udiyyah, Al Saleem later launched an independent gallery, known as the ‘International Gallery,’ which hosted numerous solo and group shows, helping to nurture a fledgling community of modern artists.

Al Saleem’s oeuvre is celebrated for its distinct visual language, a style which the artist coined ‘Horizonism’ - also referred to as Al-Afakia or the ‘desert style.’ Drawing inspiration from the shifting sands and gradating skyline of Riyadh as seen from the desert, as well as the intensity of the Saudi sun, Al Saleem reimagined his beloved landscape through the prism of abstraction. Horizontal bands, rhythmic sweeps of color, and subtle tonal gradations evoke the feel of calligraphic flow as much as it does his environmental space. In some works such , Al Saleem replaced the traditional horizon line with stylized forms resembling Arabic calligraphy, merging desert topography with heritage motifs — a fusion of modernist abstraction and cultural identity. His painted deserts reflect not just a visual landscape, but a spiritual one; as Al Saleem explained in a mid-1970s essay, he studied “the color and composition of the desert environment […] through the effect of the force of the sun,” and attempted to convey the power of sunlight across the dunes by employing warm tonalities instead of shadows; such an approach imbued his paintings with a meditative, almost transcendental quality, making his desert scenes as much about.mes mory, light, and identity as about the landscape (Exh. Cat., Kalima min Ajl al-Fann, Muhammad al-Salim, Saudi Arabian Society for the Arts, Riyadh 1976).

Since his passing in 1997, Al Saleem has continued to receive international acclaim for his visionary practice. In 2023, Al Saleem’s Untitled (1986) achieved $1.1 million USD at Replica Shoes ’s, the highest amount fetched for any Saudi artist at auction.