Alia Ahmad: 'Aspects [مظاهر]'

Lawrie Shabibi is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in the UAE of Saudi Arabian artist Alia Ahmad. Aspects [مظاهر], presenting a new body of paintings and watercolours.  

She seeks, in Aspects to peel back the layers in order to expose her personal vocabulary. Ahmad’s point of departure - the rapidly changing environment of her home city, Riyadh, where traditional ways of life existing alongside industrialisation and modernisation, where native plant life and cultural art forms thrive within one of the world’s fastest growing urban settings. This provides fertile ground for exploration. Ahmad’s segmented compositions, with their tonal contrasts, modulated colours, sinewy brushwork and gestural forms provide a sense of constant growth.

Ahmad’s new works are of an intimate scale. She deconstructs the various elements that make up her world. With abstracted vegetal, floral, geometric shapes and motifs sometimes resembling stones, flowers, and others webs or micro-structures, she creates her own lexicon of forms.

Some paintings, square in format, feature a single motif. Akin to the fragmentary patterns seen on embroidered offcuts of a textile or wall murals, here she gives a glimpse of an infinite geometry, that might unfold far beyond the borders of the works themselves, into boundless space.