Permenant Collection 2009 | The Greenbox Museum, Amsterdam

The Greenbox Museum of Contemporary Art from Saudi Arabia is a private collection which can be visited at Amsterdam's central square Leidseplein. The museum shows work by the avant garde of Saudi Arabia, a country that is important to the world because it has custody of the cities that are most holy to muslims. The museum is the first museum in the world for art from Saudi Arabia. There is no such museum in Saudi Arabia itself. On the basis of its research the museum publishes on internet a dictionary of Saudi Arabian artists.

The museum is the size and ambition of a cabinet of curiosities, which is how many notable museums once started. One such museum is the ancient and respected Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The Ashmolean is now building a special galley for their important collection of Islamic art with the assistance of Saudi Arabia. Without prejudice however for this special relationship with Islam, Saudi Arabia can also be seen as a country like others with ideas and traditions particular to the land and its regions, which find their way into the mind and work of artists. However much they struggle to achieve the absolute, art is like water and takes colour and direction from the land over which it runs and from the sky above it. Looking at it this way, actually clears a view for the absolute.