Alia Ahmad is a 26-year-old Saudi Arabian painter (b.1996).

 

After graduating in 2018 from Kings College London with a BA in Digital Culture, she started to focus on research in Fine Art. Recently graduated with a Master's from the Royal College of Art, Alia concentrates on painting but uses a range of media to narrate the way that memory, place, and landscape can converge within a written and visual practice.

 

Alia’s color palette is influenced by an upbringing in Riyadh’s industrial/desert landscape. A majority of her paintings represent the different placid dreamscapes, with linear impressions of the Saudi landscape. The visual language of the paintings plays on the tense contradiction that exists between the extreme emptiness of place and its lush characteristics. Using drawings made in a specific place, she focuses on key aspects such as local flora in a chosen environment. She has recently been looking into a way to play with perspective in the landscape by placing an emphasis on the temporal nature of day and night.

 

Her works examine the point at which lightly touches upon distinct parts of the land. Additionally, she aims to investigate the balance between natural elements, such as light and plants, by painting them even more explicitly. Alia finds that by directing paintings towards the ‘linguistic’, through the use of motifs, she is able to steer the narration within the work. The overarching narrative in the current paintings focuses on the way that memory is able to act as well as react, to the theme of landscape in the Saudi environment.