Louay Kayali - From Aleppo's Streets to a $900,000 Record in Riyadh

6 September 2026

On the evening of February 8, 2025, in Diriyah outside Riyadh, Sotheby's opened its first auction ever held in Saudi Arabia. Lot after lot went by until a 1965 oil came up: women and children carrying what remained of their homes, walking toward nowhere in particular. Then What?? by Louay Kayali. The bidding stretched into what Sotheby's later called an extended battle, and settled at $900,000 - the highest auction price recorded for a Syrian painting, and a jump of more than 150 percent over Kayali's previous record.

The painter

Kayali was born in Aleppo on January 20, 1934. He was painting by eleven and held his first solo show at eighteen. A government scholarship took him to the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, and in 1960 he represented Syria at the 30th Venice Biennale alongside Fateh Moudarres - the first weighty official outing for modern Syrian painting in Europe.

His subject never changed: the lottery-ticket vendor, the shoeshine boy, the exhausted fisherman, the waiting mother. Few lines, flat grounds, frequently masonite board instead of canvas. Academic control underneath, unquiet feeling on top.

Then What?? belongs to a 1965 cycle on the Palestinian displacement - Sotheby's describes the picture as a scene of the displaced rendered with an eerie sense of premonition. Kayali's fragility matched his sensitivity; he destroyed a number of his own works in the late 1960s and died in early 1978, aged 44. The small surviving body of work is part of what drives the market today.

Reading the number

The record did not come from nowhere. Prices climbed through the 2010s in Dubai and London sales, then Fisherboy (1976) made $341,200 at Bonhams in June 2024, and Diriyah followed eight months later. New Gulf collectors and institutional buying in Saudi Arabia and Qatar did the rest.

A caution for collectors: records are set by major, well-provenanced compositions. Works on paper and minor pieces trade at a fraction of headline numbers. For the full picture of documented top results, see the most expensive Syrian artworks at auction.

Kayali is usually read alongside Fateh Moudarres and Marwan Kassab-Bachi as the founding triangle of Syrian modernism, with echoes reaching contemporary painters like Safwan Dahoul. More artist files and market guides in the articles index.