I am a doctor and confront life and death every day … I am a country man and at the same time, I am the son of this strange, scary oil civilization. In ten years our lives changed completely. For me it is a drastic change that I experience every day.
- Ahmed Mater

One of the most prominent contemporary artists of Saudi Arabia, Ahmed Mater explores the paradoxical natures of science/faith, modernisation/tradition and religion/globalisation in his scrutiny of contemporary realities. Also a practising physician, Mater entwines scientific objectives with politically-charged artistic expressions throughout his body of work.

Evolution of Man, 2010, comments on the rapid evolution of Saudi Arabia since its discovery of oil in 1938, which transformed the Kingdom’s development fuelled by petrodollars. In this iconic work, the morphing of a gas pump into a man, gun to its head, reflects on a foreboding prognosis - that of the risks to the environment, social fabric and ultimate threat to cycles of destruction.

Mater was the first Saudi artist with a solo museum exhibition in the United States (2016): Symbolic Cities: The Work of Ahmed Mater at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. Further exhibitions include the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2019); Guggenheim, New York (2016); New Museum, New York (2014); Museum of Islamic Art, Doha (2013); Kochi Muziris Biennale, Kerala (2012); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2011), Venice Biennale (2009, 2011) and the Sharjah Biennial (2007, 2013). Mater’s works are held in the collections of the British Museum, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others.