Where to buy paintings in Riyadh and Jeddah, and when to commission

Riyadh's galleries sit in two quarters. The older runs along the Olaya, Takhassusi and Al-Urubah roads, around Al Mousa Centre, a 1980s shopping mall reborn as an arts hub with about 20 galleries. It faces the King Fahd National Library on Olaya Street, and most of its galleries and studios open in the evening, often from about 5 to 10 pm. The newer quarter is the JAX District in Diriyah, home to SAMoCA, Diriyah Art Futures and several commercial galleries.

Painting shops are a separate trade, and a 2026 Riyadh directory maps them by speciality: nature scenes and budget pieces in Al-Sulaymaniyah, heritage and traditional work on Al-Uruba Road, and custom paintings on Takhassusi Street and in Al-Nakheel.

Choose the stop by the wall, and for a majlis or a whole villa bring the measurements and a photo of the room, because size is where most shelves stop. More on the capital in wall art in Riyadh.

Several of Jeddah's leading commercial galleries sit in Al Rawdah and on Serafi Mega Mall Street, with a second ring of art centres and studios in Al Sharafiyah, Al Nuzhah and Al Andalus. In Al Balad, the historic district, a painter's studio-gallery shows portraits among the restored houses, and Hayy Jameel, the arts complex in Al Muhammadiyah, puts galleries, makers' studios and resident shops under one roof.

If your brief includes a verse or an Islamic pattern, visit the House of Islamic Arts in Jeddah Park first: the Kingdom's first museum solely for Islamic art shows Qur'anic manuscripts and calligraphy across six galleries, a good way to settle on a script before briefing a calligrapher. In Dammam, Khobar and Dhahran the galleries are fewer and much of the ready-made wall art comes from branches of the national home chains, so a large original is usually a canvas painted to the wall and sent by express courier. More on the Red Sea city in wall art in Jeddah.

Each kind of seller does one job well. Read the table from the right-hand column, starting with the wall you are filling.

Hand-painted stock rarely goes much beyond 2 metres, and the small-painting shows stop at about 50 cm, so a majlis wall of four or five metres is beyond both. Online is the widest shelf of all, and the hardest to judge from a photograph.

Each canvas can travel stretched and ready to hang, framed, or rolled; a rolled canvas, the lightest and most economical way to send a large painting, arrives without stretcher bars, and any local framer can stretch it for you.

Most Saudi galleries sell by enquiry. A Saudi art advisor told Arab News in March 2026 that most of the Kingdom's art market happens privately, with no public price at all, and the head of the Visual Arts Commission has described Saudis as traditionally very private about collecting. Art weeks are more open: at the first Art Week Riyadh, in April 2025, price lists were on the stands and dealers sold to Saudi collectors new to their programmes.

Go with the wall's width and height, the artists or subjects you like, and a budget. Ask for the size in centimetres, the medium and how the work will reach you, and whether the artist takes commissions, because a gallery sells each work at the size its artist chose. Time your visits for the cooler months, when the calendar runs from Noor Riyadh in November to Art Week in April.

Small-painting exhibitions are the Saudi art world's own route to a first original: works no larger than about 50 cm, at deliberately modest prices, organised by the Arab Society for Culture and Arts, the Saudi Society for Visual Arts and private galleries. One Jeddah show, now past its fifteenth edition, gathers about 100 Saudi and Arab artists, veterans among them, to put a painting in every home.

The pioneers are a different matter: works by Saudi modernists that once sold locally now go to international auction, so a first-generation name is a collecting decision, made with a gallery's advice. At home the two routes combine well: hang the small original where it is seen up close, by the entrance or in a study, and give the long walls canvases made to their size in the same palette. Companies will find more in office wall art in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi buyers increasingly turn to international platforms for things not readily available locally, and marketplace listings put imported 'hand-painted' canvases, prints and paint-by-numbers kits side by side. Read each listing as a specification:

• Size in centimetres, of the canvas rather than the frame.
• Medium. Acrylic or oil on canvas is paint; canvas print, UV print and giclée are prints, whatever the title says.
• Side light. A phone torch across the surface shows brush and knife marks casting small, varied shadows; a print stays flat or repeats one embossed texture.

A canvas made to order is therefore agreed through approvals: with iHomeArt you see photographs or video at each stage, and a side-lit photo of the texture if you ask, before the next stage starts. See our textured paintings.

We suggest a size and a shortlist from some 1,300 designs, or design a piece for your project, and your quote, priced for your sizes and finishes, usually arrives within one business day. Order one canvas first if you like; we keep its code on file so the rest of a set can follow in the same hand.

Larger orders may go by air or sea freight, with the shipping cost confirmed before dispatch, and DHL, FedEx and UPS all offer real-time tracking in the Kingdom. The walls of a Saudi home are in villas and majlis rooms; the whole market in our Saudi Arabia wall art guide.