about
Sultan bin Fahad (b. 1971, Riyadh, KSA, where he lives and works) considers art as a journey between intangible memories and tangible cultures. Throughout his abstract drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations bin Fahad’s central theme and object of concern are material cultures in his native Saudi Arabia and their evolution over time.
Across his works bin Fahad reinterprets history, stories and poetics through an engagement with pieces of tangible culture; transposing tried and true narratives onto contemporary means so as to reassess them with a personal take on Saudi Arabia, the Middle East, and the wider world. The themes intrinsic to his practice revolve on reimagining found objects, identities, and history towards new understandings of their ranged applicability and liminal impermanence. His paintings and installations grapple with new media techniques, subtleties and overtonings, battling textures coalescing into harmony, towards jettisoning the niche and obscure to mainstream accessibility.
With projects ranging from investigations into the ghosts of a stately manor, the work and painstaking detail behind the scenes in deconstructed display, to a candy-coated take on the joys and nightmares of history, the multiplicity of Sultan bin Fahad’s practices push against the tide of conventionality in the art sphere, as indelibly informed by his cultural heritage as it ever plays with what it means to create, connect, inspire and our methods of communicating and expressing that.
Connecting the past to present day, the core of his works lie in how they're able to evoke the multi-layered journey(s) between the latent relationship of what is remembered and that which remains in the after, silently contained within the corporeal, and tethering both to a painting, a space, a theme, a mood for all in which to partake and ponder.