DUBAI.- Ayyam Gallery will present Hisham Sharif’s first solo exhibition at the gallery and in the UAE. Hisham Sharif’s practice offers a vulnerable, nuanced presentation of life. Please join us for the vernissage on September 23rd, from 6 PM to 9 PM, in the presence of Hisham Sharif.
Influenced by 19th-century French painting and beyond, Sharif’s language is foreign to the region and to his local contemporaries, yet beneath its apparent estrangement, his practice illuminates a rather conservative society, unveiling the subtleties, rituals, and quiet rhythms that shape their everyday life. Privacy and intimacy are where Sharif introduces color, expressive hues that meld harsh truths with illusions of what could be. Sharif’s approach ensures that his depiction of these taboos is conveyed through humble depictions that preserve a certain Oriental sensibility, avoiding the shock value or censorship they might otherwise provoke. The scenes are all about ambiance, a haze of what was, what is, and what could be. While relatable and nuanced, these are very much autobiographical and personal to the artist, about the struggles of private and artist life in a closed society.
In keeping with his practice, the scenes remain veiled yet allusive. They tell stories of coming of age, love, and relationships that shape our personalities and characters. Hisham’s compositions are built on tension and rich brushstrokes—the same tension the artist lives through, between eroticism and tradition, reflection and reality, memory and imagination, erasure and revelation, and symbolism and bluntness. The targeted areas of color become the subject of the artwork, rather than the reverse, making the human presence within the work the subject only when the artist intends it to—a testament to his compositional strength through color and expressive brushwork. Sharif breaks the fourth wall through his voyeuristic scenes. Each painting, whether small or large in scale, acts as a window into Hisham Sharif’s introspective reflections on his surroundings, which he both criticizes and illuminates.
Reflective surfaces recur throughout the composition, prompting us to question what is real and what isn’t, keeping the subject abstract, nostalgic, and uncertain about what is real and what is a fragment of our imagination. The illusionistic quality of the works also emerges through shadows, undefined human figures, or ghostly presences; together, these elements render Sharif’s paintings dreamlike or imaginary. This effect is further reinforced by the recurring motif of the mirror, which Sharif employs as a symbolic element throughout his work, acting as another metaphor for the liminal space between reality and illusion. Together or apart, ideas of longing and loneliness arise.
Sharif’s interior scenes gradually give way to exterior moments and depictions of the animal kingdom, introducing Sharif’s ancestry through Persian symbolism drawn from Persian Mythology. This ancestry allows Sharif to reinterpret symbolism and to represent human behavior through the lens of the wild, patriarchy, and social expectations. Sharif isn’t simply observing; he’s softening and romanticizing a life he critiques, a life of ladies and liquor. The depiction of the cheetah and the gazelle becomes a recurring theme: the predator and the prey, ideals of masculinity and femininity, continue to fill Sharif’s canvases.
Allusive Veil serves as a denouement to the moments Sharif captures throughout his paintings. Each tableau mirrors the circumstances that have surrounded him, now leading to the resolution of an introspective struggle he has been grappling with for the past few years.
Guided by both emotion and technique, Hisham Sharif’s paintings serve as emotional landscapes: dense, intuitive, and haunted by fragments of personal and collective history. Initially trained in finance, Sharif applies a structural clarity to the chaotic, exploring dislocation and inherited memory for their formal and psychological significance. His canvases rarely reveal a clear subject, yet they pulse with presence—evoking seascapes, architectural ruins, or intimate scenes.
There is a restlessness in Sharif’s surfaces—built through layered washes, scraped textures, and luminous shifts of tone—that convey a deeper concern with erasure and revelation. He’s not interested in narrative. He’s pursuing something much less stable: mood, ambiance, and the emotional afterimage of experience.
Sharif’s recent work reveals his increased comfort with ambiguity. He explores ritual, heritage, and mythology, but always through a veil—implying that being rooted in a place can also mean feeling disconnected from it. The result is a practice that feels both deeply personal and politically conscious, rooted in Bahrain, but resonating globally through his experiences and Persian ancestry. In an era when much of contemporary painting seems overly self-aware or eager to explain itself, Sharif relies on sensation. Through this approach, he offers us something rare: paintings that linger long after they’re seen.
Selected exhibitions include Frightening the Dark, his first solo exhibition in 2017, and Sharif & Sharif in 2022.
Sharif also won the Al Dana Award at the 50th edition of the Bahrain Annual Fine Arts Exhibition and received a Recognition Award for Outstanding Work at the 45th edition. He has also taken part in residencies in New York and Bahrain.
Sharif’s work is housed in the permanent collection of the Bahrain National Museum.
