B. 1945, D. 2022. Lived and worked between Beirut and Amman, where she was born. She studied sculpture at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. Saudi sculpted 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 returned 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 described 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. A monumental 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.