Art & Culture

Saudi Artist PILLOWER Is Finally Bringing His Paintings Home

BYMille Team

June 9, 2026

Before you even look at the paintings, you’re met with a table. Not just any table, but Al Sofra, the emotional and physical centerpiece of Saudi artist Badr Al Banawi’s (who goes by PILLOWER) debut solo exhibition. Set in the middle of Hayy Jameel’s Saalat Hayy and conceived alongside his sister, designer Arwa Al Banawi, the installation is a fitting introduction to an exhibition that revolves around memory, belonging, and the strange feeling of returning home after spending years away.

Opening on June 10 in Jeddah, Al Sofra marks the first-ever solo exhibition by Al Banawi. While the show may be his debut, it is hardly the work of an emerging artist. For the past decade, the 30-year-old artist has been painting from his studio in Zurich, building a body of work shaped by a life lived between Saudi Arabia and Europe.

Born into an artistic household, Al Banawi grew up surrounded by creativity. His father collected art, while his mother worked as an expressionist painter, often teaching him through informal painting sessions at home. Those early experiences would become the foundation of a practice rooted in observation, emotion, and curiosity. Raised between Jeddah, Bavaria, and the Swiss mountains, he developed a relationship with landscape long before he began seriously painting it.

Botafumeiro, 2026 Oil on canvas 150 x 80 cm. Supplied

That sense of duality runs throughout the two-day-long exhibition, which was curated by Myriam Djelouat-Benaroya, founder of art agency MEEMS. Across 16 paintings, viewers encounter crowded restaurant interiors, vast desert landscapes, turbulent seascapes, and characters caught somewhere between comedy and heartbreak. Take Botafumeiro, a large-scale painting depicting a restaurant buzzing with life. Diners gather around pink-clothed tables, conversations seem to unfold mid-sentence, and figures appear suspended somewhere between celebration and confrontation. Elsewhere, Warmth swaps the chaos of human interaction for sweeping amber dunes and a crimson sun floating above the landscape. Then there is What Good Does Regret Do?, perhaps one of the exhibition’s most relatable works, which follows a man caring for a plant through four seasons only for it to die anyway. Equal parts tragic and darkly funny, it captures the exhibition’s ability to find humor inside disappointment.

Warmth, 2026 Oil on canvas 210 x 150 cm. Supplied

Al Banawi’s paintings carry traces of Switzerland, Germany, and Saudi Arabia without fully belonging to any of them. Instead, they occupy the space in between, where memory, identity, and experience become far messier and far more interesting.

Saudi Artist PILLOWER Is Finally Bringing His Paintings Home

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Saudi Artist PILLOWER Is Finally Bringing His Paintings Home

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