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Mathqaf مَثقَف

@mathqaf

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We publish, research, curate, collaborate, and champion art from West Asia and North Africa.

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Eid Mubarak 🩵🕋

Artwork details:
Abdulhalim Radwi (1939-2006, Saudi), ‘Haj Day’, 1987, Mixed media on canvas, 100 x 120 cm. Collection @mathafmodern by @mathqaf

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Opening this week in Dubai, Forat Gallery (@galleryforat) presents the solo exhibition of Kuwaiti artist Samia Al-Sayed Omar at La Palmeraie, Jumeira (15–18 May 2026).

Born in Kuwait in 1947, Samia Al-Sayed Omar showed an early affinity for the plastic arts, going on to earn a Master of Drawing from the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid in 1971. Her formative years in Madrid immersed her in the rigorous draughtsmanship of the Spanish academic school while exposing her to the crosscurrents of late European modernism that shaped the city’s cultural landscape during the final decades of the Franco era. Her subsequent studies — spanning an Arabic Diploma (1986), Interior Design at ICS Pennsylvania, Secretarial Studies and Accounting in Canada, and a certification in Teaching English to Non-Native Speakers — speak to a restless intellectual curiosity and a worldview shaped by the full spectrum of humanistic inquiry.
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Samia Al-Sayed Omar
Solo Exhibition
Forat Gallery
La Palmeraie, 36 Al Sheraa Street, Jumeira, Dubai

Exhibition Dates: 15 – 18 May 2026

1: ‘Longing’ (1996)
2: ‘First Days of the Kuwait Invasion’ (1990)
3: ‘The Universe’ (2018)
4: ‘Waves Crashing Against the Ship’ (2011)
5: ‘Anticipated Hope’ (1996)
6: ‘Covid’ (2020) by @mathqaf

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Mazher Nizar (b. 1958, India) is a Yemeni artist based in Sana’a. Trained in graphic art, his practice moves between painting, drawing, and printmaking, often working through densely layered compositions and fragmented forms. Across his works, the image is constructed through accumulation and distortion, where gesture and texture become central to the structure of the surface.

Artwork details:
Mazher Nizar (b. 1958, India), ‘Breathing Window’. by @mathqaf

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Mohammad Omer Khalil (b. 1936, Sudan) is a New York–based Sudanese artist and master printmaker, and one of the pioneers of Sudanese modernism. He received classical training in painting in Khartoum before continuing his studies in fresco, printmaking, and mosaic between Florence and Ravenna, where he developed his approach to working symbiotically between painting and etching.

After immigrating to New York in 1967, Khalil established M.O.K., a printmaking studio specialising in editions and collaborations with artists including Louise Nevelson, Al Held, and Sean Scully, as well as galleries and workshops such as Pace and Robert Blackburn’s. He stewarded the Asilah printmaking workshop in Morocco for 27 years and mentored generations of printmakers through his teaching at Pratt Institute, New York University, and Columbia University.

His work has been exhibited internationally — from the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and Institut du Monde Arabe to Mathaf, Sharjah Art Foundation, and Mosaic Rooms — and is held in major public collections, including a recent significant acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1: Mohammad Omer Khalil at his studio
2: Studio details
3: ‘Baby Blue’
4: ‘Tombstone Blues’
5: ‘Verso Del Coran’
6: ‘Composition with Arabic Calligraphy’ (2/4)
7: ‘Self Portrait’
8: ‘Season of Migration to the North I’
9: ‘Homage to Om Kalthoum’
📸: Samoel Gonzalez (@samorius)

Special thanks to Jenna Hammed (@j7md) and #AminaAhmad for their contribution 🤍 by @mathqaf

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Ali Al-Tajer (b. 1962, Iraq) draws on Iraqi myth, legend, and the everyday, staging the figure within symbolic landscapes shaped by water, land, fertility, and urban life. Working through a restrained surrealist language, his compositions hold together registers of grief, power, and endurance, where the weight of lived experience—particularly that of war—remains quietly inscribed within the image.

Artwork details:
Ali Al Tajer (Iraq, b. 1962), ‘Eclipse’ (2024), oil on canvas, 86 x 60 cm. by @mathqaf

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Suad Al-Attar (b. 1942) is a pioneering Iraqi artist whose practice draws on Arab poetry, history, and mythology, weaving Mesopotamian motifs and Iraq’s folkloric past into compositions rooted in a deep literary sensibility. She studied under Jewad Selim and was part of the Baghdad Modern Art Group in the early 1960s, with her 1965 Baghdad show recognised as among the first solo exhibitions by an Iraqi woman. Based in London since 1976, her work continues to draw on Iraq’s ancient, Islamic, and modern heritage.

Artwork details:
Suad Al-Attar (Iraq, b. 1942), ‘Eve and the Tree of Life’ (1998), Oil on canvas, 30.5 × 25.5 cm. by @mathqaf

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Khaled Jarada (b. 1996) is a Palestinian artist working across painting and digital drawing. Born in Gaza, he holds a BA in Multimedia from the University of Palestine, and from a young age became known locally for his dynamic compositions. His paintings hold figures mid-motion, suspended in states of imbalance and quiet disquiet, drawing on his own experience of displacement to render the in-between as its own kind of place.

Artwork details:
Khaled Jarada (Palestine, b. 1996), ‘Barricade 1’ (2020), Acrylic on canvas, 90 × 80 cm. by @mathqaf

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On International Labour Day, we turn to ‘The Revolution is a Weapon and a Worker’s Arm’ (1979) by Palestinian artist Abdel Rahman Al Muzain (b. 1943) — a poster originally issued by the Unified Information of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and published by SAMED (Palestine Martyrs Works Society). A woman in embroidered thobe stands at the centre, lifting up a group of farmers and builders, arranged around the Dome of the Rock. Here, labour, land, and liberation are rendered inseparable.

Courtesy of the Palestine Poster Project Archives and The Palestinian Museum. by @mathqaf

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This year’s Venice Biennale sees artist Yto Barrada represent France at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, with her project ‘Comme Saturne’ curated by Myriam Ben Salah. Marking the French Pavilion’s grand return to its newly renovated historic building, the exhibition unfolds as an immersive installation in which textiles become a language of time, memory, and metamorphosis.

Reactivating the cosmological imaginary associated with Saturn—planet of melancholy, withdrawal, and slow thought—Barrada takes ‘dévoré’, the textile finishing technique, as her paradoxical starting point, echoing the phrase “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children”. The pavilion unfolds like a suite for Saturn, weaving together wool, acid-eaten fabric, natural dyes, and language games to offer less an escape than a poetic survival tool—a way of lucidly inhabiting the world’s instability.
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Yto Barrada: Comme Saturne
French Pavilion, 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
Curated by Myriam Ben Salah
9 May – 22 November 2026

1: Yto Berrada
2: Yto Berrada and Myriam Ben Salah
📸: Benoît Peverelli by @mathqaf

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Zuhair Hassib (b. 1960) is a Syrian artist working across painting, graphic art, and mixed media. Born in the Jazeera region of Syria to a Kurdish family, he studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus in the early 1980s under the late Syrian painter Fateh Moudarres (1922-1999), with whom he later worked closely for nearly fifteen years.

For over three decades, Hassib has worked from his studio in Al-Saboura, near Damascus, developing a visual language rooted in the landscapes, folklore, and women of his native environment, and recognisable for his distinctive use of turquoise, white, and earth tones.

Artwork via @zuhairhassib by @mathqaf

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Fatima Muhib (1927-2006) was a pioneering figure in Palestinian modern art whose practice spanned portraiture, landscape, and architectural painting. Born in Jericho, she received a scholarship to study at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts at Ibrahim Pasha University in Cairo, graduating in 1942, before continuing her studies in the United States.

Alongside her artistic practice, Muhib played a formative role in shaping art education across Palestine and Jordan—working at the Jordanian Ministry of Tourism, the Jerusalem District Education Directorate as an Art Director, and later the Jordanian Ministry of Education as an Art Education Supervisor, where she served on the committee responsible for developing the national art education curriculum.

Artwork details:
Fatima Muhib (Palestine, 1927-2006), ‘Untitled’, Oil on wood. Collection of @jngfa. by @mathqaf

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Opening in Dubai this May, ‘Five Painters’ at @taymourgrahneprojects brings together five painters from the Gulf: Dalal Al-Obaidi (b. 1996, Kuwait), Hawazin Alotaibi (b. 1993, Wisconsin), Hayfa Algwaiz (b. 1991, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia), Latifa Alajlan (b. 1998, Kuwait) and Roudhah Al Mazrouei (b. 2003, Al Ain, UAE). Their practices reflect, each in its own unique way, the conditions shaping a new generation of artists in the Gulf.

The exhibition is accompanied by commissioned texts written by: Afraa Al Hassan (artist and writer), Alexia Marmara (writer, researcher and archivist), Moustafa Thaer (founder of Thaer Select), Saam Niami (writer and co-director at Ward Gallery, New York), Salem AlSuwaidi (curator, writer, and collector) and Sara bin Safwan (curator at Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and founder & curator at Salasil).
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Five Painters
Group Show
Taymour Grahne Projects
Warehouse 31a, Lane 4, Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz 1, Dubai

Opening: Saturday 16 May 2026, from 6 to 9pm
Exhibition Dates: 17 May – 11 July 2026

1: Hawazin Alotaibi, Shy Boy (2026)
2: Dalal Al-Obaidi, You Wanted More (2025)
3: Roudhah Al Mazrouei, Falaj Scene (2026)
4: Latifa Alajlan, Untitled (2026)

Images courtesy of the artists and @taymourgrahneprojects by @mathqaf

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