RIYADH: Contemporary Saudi artist Kawthar Al-Atiyah uses painting, sculpture and immersive material experimentation to create her deeply personal works. And those works focus on one recurring question: What does emotion look like when it becomes physical?  

“My practice begins with the body as a site of memory — its weight, its tension, its quiet shifts,” Al-Atiyah tells Arab News. “Emotion is never abstract to me. It lives in texture, in light, in the way material breathes.”  

This philosophy shapes the immersive surfaces she creates, which often seem suspended between presence and absence. “There is a moment when the body stops being flesh and becomes presence, something felt rather than seen,” she says. “I try to capture that threshold.”  

Al-Atiyah, a graduate of Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, has steadily built an international profile for herself. Her participation in VOLTA Art Fair at Art Basel in Switzerland, MENART Fair in Paris, and exhibitions in the Gulf and Europe have positioned her as a leading Saudi voice in contemporary art.  

Showing abroad has shaped her understanding of how audiences engage with vulnerability. “Across countries and cultures, viewers reacted to my work in ways that revealed their own memories,” she says. “It affirmed my belief that the primary language of human beings is emotion. My paintings speak first to the body, then to the mind.” 

Al-Atiyah says her creative process begins long before paint touches canvas. Instead of sketching, she constructs physical environments made of materials including camel bone, raw cotton, transparent fabrics, and fragments of carpet.  

“When a concept arrives, I build it in real space,” she says. “I sculpt atmosphere, objects, light and emotion before I sculpt paint.  

“I layer color the way the body stores experience,” she continues. “Some layers stay buried, others resurface unexpectedly. I stop only when the internal rhythm feels resolved.”  

This sensitivity to the unseen has drawn attention from international institutions. Forbes Middle East included her among the 100 Most Influential Women in the Arab World in 2024 and selected several of her pieces for exhibition.  

“One of the works was privately owned, yet they insisted on showing it,” she says. “For me, that was a strong sign of trust and recognition. It affirmed my responsibility to represent Saudi culture with honesty and depth.”  

Her recent year-long exhibition at Ithra deepened her understanding of how regional audiences interpret her work.  

“In the Gulf, people respond strongly to embodied memory,” she says. “They see themselves in the quiet tensions of the piece, perhaps because we share similar cultural rhythms.”  

A documentary is now in production exploring her process, offering viewers a rare look into the preparatory world that precedes each canvas.  

“People usually see the final work. But the emotional architecture built before the painting is where the story truly begins,” she explains.  

Beyond her own practice, Al-Atiyah is committed to art education through her work with Misk Art Institute. “Teaching is a dialogue,” she says. “I do not focus on technique alone. I teach students to develop intuition, to trust their senses, to translate internal experiences into honest visual language.”  

She believes that artists should be emotionally aware as well as technically skilled. “I want them to connect deeply with themselves so that what they create resonates beyond personal expression and becomes part of a cultural conversation,” she explains.  

In Saudi Arabia’s rapidly growing art scene, Al-Atiyah sees her role as both storyteller and facilitator.  

“Art is not decoration, it is a language,” she says. “If my work helps someone remember something they have forgotten or feel something they have buried, then I have done what I set out to do.”