Mona Saudi

• Biography

  Mona Saudi was born in 1945 in Amman. She studied sculpture at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She lives and works in Beirut and Amman. Saudi sculpts mainly in stone. Her forms are full of vitality, beauty and a clear sense of equilibrium. Saudi created her first sculpture in stone in 1965, named Mother/Earth. She frequently returns to ideas of fertility and growth. Always starting with basic shapes: the square, circle, cylinder, rectangle, she goes on to give them movement, a life of their own by either repeating their forms, varying their depths or heights, or cutting them across one another to create new, graceful compositions. She describes herself as a stone lover, respecting and manipulating the primary material of the earth to create her powerful and timeless works. Saudi revels in finding different forms of natural stone from the Middle East, using white marble from Carrara, pink limestone and green marble from Jordan, or black diorite from Syria, Mona creates modern, abstract forms expressing themes of life force and creation. An imposant sculpture by Mona Saudi stands outside the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the only work permitted to grace the surrounding precinct by its architect Jean Nouvel