Saudi artist Alia Ahmad to show her work at Dubai gallery Lawrie Shabibi

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

Dubai-based, Alserkal Avenue-located gallery Lawrie Shabibi has announced the first solo exhibition in the UAE of Saudi Arabian artist, Alia Ahmad. Titled “Aspects” (Sept. 18 — Oct. 22), the show presents a new body of paintings and watercolours by the artist. “Alia Ahmad seeks in ‘Aspects’ to peel back the layers in order to expose her personal vocabulary,” says the gallery. Ahmad’s point of departure is the rapidly changing environment of her home city, Riyadh, where traditional ways of life exist alongside industrialisation and modernisation and where native plant life and cultural art forms thrive inside one of the world’s fastest growing urban settings.

The smorgasbord provides fertile ground for exploration. Ahmad’s segmented compositions, with tonal contrasts, modulated colours, sinewy brushwork and gestural forms, proffer a sense of constant growth. The new works are on an intimate scale. The artist deconstructs various elements that make up her world and through abstracted vegetal, floral, geometric shapes and motifs sometimes resembling stones, flowers or micro-structures, she creates her own lexicon of forms. Some paintings are square in format and feature a single motif. Akin to the fragmentary patterns seen on embroidered offcuts of a textile or wall murals, Ahmad here gives a glimpse of an infinite geometry that might unfold far beyond the borders of the works themselves, into infinite space.

Raised in Riyadh, Ahmad (b. 1996), graduated from King’s College London with a BA in Digital Culture in 2018. She recently completed her Master’s at the Royal College of Art. With a focus on painting, she employs various media to explore the convergence of memory, place, and landscape, within her visual and written practice. Her colour palette is influenced by an upbringing in Riyadh’s industrial/desert landscape. A majority of her paintings represent different dreamscapes, with linear impressions of the Saudi landscape. The visual language of the paintings plays on the tense contradiction that exists between the (supposed) extreme emptiness of place and its in-your-face lush characteristics.

Using drawings made in a specific place, she concentrates on key aspects such as local flora in a chosen environment. Her works examine the point at which she interacts with distinct parts of the land. She has recently been looking into a way to deal with perspective in the landscape by placing an emphasis on the temporal nature of day and night. She aims to investigate the balance between natural elements, such as light and plants, by painting them explicitly. The overarching narrative in the artwork focuses on the way in which memory acts as well as reacts to the theme of landscape in a Saudi environment.

 Alia Ahmad at her colourful best.

Her solo exhibitions include Albion Jeune, London, UK (2024); White Cube, Paris, France (2024); Massimo de Carlo, Paris, France (2023), Hafez Gallery, Jeddah, KSA (2022) and Gallery Bawa, Kuwait City, Kuwait (2021). She has exhibited in several group exhibitions including ‘After Rain’ at the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Riyadh, KSA (2024); ‘In the Shadow’ at White Cube, London, UK (2023); ‘Considering Female Abstraction’ at the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, Texas, USA (2023), ‘Memory Deposit’, Fenaa Al-Awwal, Riyadh, KSA (2022) and ‘Make It Public: Memory Collective’, Design Museum, London, UK (2020), among others. She lives and works in Riyadh.

Lawrie Shabibi was founded in 2010 and opened its doors in early 2011 in Alserkal Avenue, located within the light industrial warehouse district of Al Quoz in Dubai. Following the relocation of several renowned galleries, the zone quickly became the hub of contemporary art in the region; the gallery has been a forerunner in the development of this contemporary art scene. Its initial focus was on the practices of emerging contemporary artists from the Middle East and North Africa (the Global South), and Lawrie Shabibi has introduced artists from other regions and generations, yet with the same focus on under-represented art makers.

A major focus is the support of artists from the diaspora who create work in all media and explore issues such as identity, memory, history and socio-political issues specific to the diasporic experience. Another part of the programme is organising art historical exhibitions and working with older generations of artists. “By integrating older (and less discovered) artists with younger artists, we create a context and depth to the programme which we consider important when working with under-represented regions,” says the gallery. Of note are the historic shows presented for the Moroccan pioneer Mohamed Melehi (1936-2020), Iraqi/French artist Mehdi Moutashar (b.1943) and Mona Saudi (1945-2022), at fairs that include Frieze Masters in London, Abu Dhabi Art and Artissima in Turin, showing works from the 1950s–1980s. Lawrie Shabibi also works with museums and has successfully placed works with the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, British Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, LACMA, Cincinnati Art Museum and the Crocker Art Museum.