DUBAI.- This summer, Ayyam Gallery presents Tangerine Dreams, a collective exhibition centered on the color orange. Occupying a unique space between intensity and comfort, orange embodies both vitality and reflection. Associated with sunlight, fire, ripened fruit, and shifting horizons, the color carries a rich spectrum of meanings that traverse cultures, histories, and emotional states.
At times radiant and celebratory, at others contemplative or nostalgic, orange becomes a vehicle through which artists explore memory, landscape, identity, and transformation. Throughout the exhibition, the color appears in varied forms, guiding viewers through moments of energy and stillness while revealing its ability to shape perception and mood.
Tangerine Dreams highlights how a single hue can forge unexpected connections across artistic practices, generations, and geographies, transforming the gallery into a space of warmth, resonance, and discovery.
Tammam Azzam is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is based on building and deconstructing composition. What began as an exploration of texture through the layering of diverse media has evolved into a close examination of demolished landscapes—symbolic of his homeland’s war-ravaged environment. Azzam’s artistic practice continuously adapts to his perception of the urban surroundings, which are in constant flux due to shifting natural, environmental, and geopolitical conditions. This transformation in the visual identity of the landscape drives his work and has led him to experiment with the tension and interplay created by his chosen media
Mouteea Murad’s work sees a unification of spirituality and formalism, continuously drawing influence from the geometric forms and motifs of Islamic art. Murad began his career as a painter working on monochromatic, expressionist compositions that depict the anguish of modern man. In 2007, his work took on a renewed outlook that redirected his painting style, exploring relativity, spatiality, and the visual dynamic of geometric forms.
Hypnotizing in their emotional depth, Elias Izoli’s works captivate viewers through melancholic facial expressions that reflect intrinsic thoughts.
Izoli’s painting technique can be described as a hybrid, interweaving traditional painting methods with elements of collage. Canvas cutouts form the base pattern upon which his subjects emerge. From children to circus performers, Izoli continuously shifts his focus to different figures while maintaining a consistent intention: to draw viewers into the emotional world of his subjects and create an environment in which both artwork and audience emotionally co-exist. Izoli’s subjects provoke a subtle sense of intrusion, yet they foster a strong empathetic connection with the viewer. The melancholic atmosphere, combined with his signature muted palette, invites the audience into these intimate and emotionally charged spaces.
Texture is central to Thaier Helal’s practice, it has allowed him to craft a unique visual language that captures and reconstructs the physical and sensory dimensions of the world around him. Incorporating a variety of artistic approaches, including unconventional media, such as paint, sand, glue, coal, found objects, and more, Helal has consistently demonstrated a profound fascination with the three-dimensional qualities of his work, aiming to establish an immediate, tactile connection with his audience. Abstraction has been a defining element throughout his career, although it occasionally allows for figuration to emerge. Figurative elements have appeared in Helal’s earlier work, especially in response to the war in his native Syria.
Khaled Akil is an Aleppo-born multi-media artist who initiated his career in photography and gradually liberated himself through different media. In Khaled’s practice, photography is an understanding of light and dark, halting a moment indefinitely, and culminating it in a raw “image” of life. As the artist progressed, he began exploring collage and split the images into layers, slowly contriving different realities. Akil is perhaps best known for his series titled Pokémon Go in Syria, showing the animation characters amid woeful scenes of ravaged Syria; an intense juxtaposition.
Abdalla Al Omari is a Syrian multidisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of displacement, conflict, the human condition, and, more recently, takes on more sensitive topics around identity. Born in Damascus and currently based in Belgium, Omari uses painting as a powerful medium to express his enduring ties to Syria and his evolving persona in a new environment shaped by exile's realities. His intricately figurative and detailed works, which recently blur into composition studies, are marked by deep emotional resonance and capture life’s complexities through the expressive use of vibrant colour.
Situated within natural environments, Sama Alshaibi’s multimedia work explores spaces of conflict and the power struggles that arise in the aftermath of war and exile. Alshaibi is particularly interested in how such clashes occur between citizens and the state, creating vexing crises that impact the physical and psychic realms of the individual as resources and land, mobility, political agency, and self-affirmation are compromised.
Long considered one of the Arab Gulf’s foremost artists and a pioneer of conceptual art in the Middle East, Bahraini-born, Saudi national Faisal Samra incorporates digital photography, painting, sculpture, video, and performance in a creative repertoire that explores existentialist themes with the figure at its center. Since the mid-1970s, Samra has tested the conventional functions of media through meticulously structured works with experimentation and research as the guiding principles of his artistic practice. As his oeuvre has progressed and defied traditional modes of representation, he has rebelled against his own understanding of art, transitioning into new works that maintain three essential concepts: spontaneity, dynamism, and secrecy.
Recognized for his abstract expressionist style, Kais Salman employs painting as a potent vehicle for social commentary. Through his visceral gestures and vibrant colors, Salman addresses a wide range of contemporary issues, including political corruption, terrorism, consumerism, cosmetic surgery, religious fanaticism, imperialism, and the voyeurism of the digital age. Satire plays a central role in his practice, emphasizing the normalization of greed, narcissism, and ideological extremism—forces that have gained renewed significance in the 21st century.
Syrian artist Khaled Takreti has spent the greater part of his twenty-year career exploring a personal history that stretches between Beirut, where he was born in 1964; Damascus, where he lived before moving to the United States in his early thirties; and Paris, where he has resided since 2004. The episodic nature of the painter’s oeuvre dates back to the 1990s, when he began to address self-reflexive themes through autobiographical composites. The culled figures of his canvases are based on his family and friends, and often include self-portraits; otherwise, fictionalized moments allude to exhumed apprehension or desire.
Widely respected as an early innovator of contemporary painting in the Arab world and a prominent art theorist and critic, Asaad Arabi has continuously reinvented his painting style in an attempt to depict the rhythms, sensuality, and concealed narratives of urban environments, particularly in his native Syria. Arabi’s fascination with cities and the spaces that define them has included an extensive investigation of how inhabitants influence the formation of culture in such settings—a focus that has led to colourist approaches and abstracted forms in addition to early experiments with modernist figuration.
Dominated by vivacious childlike figures in various scenarios, Mohannad Orabi’s paintings reflect his interest in the spontaneity of process and the liberation of form that emerges when art is created intuitively without fixed directives. Many of these mixed media canvases were painted as self-portraits, revealing the artist’s fascination with the evolution of consciousness in childhood and the wonder and whimsy of the formative years that first shape our comprehension of the world. With the start of the Syrian uprising and the conflict that followed, Orabi adopted an increasingly realist approach to portraiture, drawing inspiration from the various media that are currently forging a visual repository of the war. While the artist retains an interest in the socialisation processes of childhood, his own experiences of now living outside the country have led him to consider the ways in which visual culture, social media, and digital communication have become substitutes for what was once tangible.
Palestinian artist Oussama Diab applies a conceptual approach to painting by exploiting the stylistic variants of the medium as emotive prompts in order to explore how form can articulate the urgency of sociopolitical issues. In an age where digital media have taken a dominant role in filtering our everyday experiences and the construction of imagery has become integral to the negotiation of modern life, Diab addresses the contradictions and obstacles of political conflict, globalisation, and exile through playful symbolism, references to popular culture, iconic imagery, and narrative structures. With each new series he adopts a different painting style, reflecting the impermanent nature of art as it becomes increasingly conceptual and further dematerialised.
Pioneering modernist Leila Nseir is known for her superb draftsmanship in addition to her reinterpretation of historical forms as a means of depicting reality. Initially finding artistic inspiration in the region’s ancient civilisations, Nseir often employed mythology as an allegory for life, and later worked in realism, expressionism, surrealism, and even abstraction, all while experimenting with various media and techniques. Today, her paintings have traces of these different stages of her oeuvre, indicating the journey of a seasoned artist who has frequently embarked on new creative paths.
