This week’s exhibitions across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Sharjah bring together contemporary art, photography, and modern masters. From museum shows at Louvre Abu Dhabi to galleries across the UAE, these exhibitions explore themes across memory, identity, perception, and material experimentation.
The Truth | Hussein Al Mohasen
XVA Gallery
In this recent body of work, Saudi artist Hussein Al Mohasen uses colour, text, and graffiti-inflected imagery to explore peace, humanity, and perception. Moving away from abstraction toward symbolic and iconographic forms, the works reflect the shifting space between the digital and the real, the public and the private. Poetry, multilingual text, and bold chromatic choices shape compositions that invite viewers into a hopeful visual journey, even when reality resists it. Drawing on pop art, street culture, and Arab poetic traditions, the exhibition frames art as an active, communicative force. On view until 5 February.
10am – 6pm, 7 days a week
And After
Cultural Foundation
This group exhibition in Abu Dhabi’s Cultural Foundation considers air as both element and metaphor, drawing on Arabic terms such as sukoon, hawaa, naseem, and riyah to explore states of stillness, movement, and transformation. Featuring mixed-media works by 15 artists, the exhibition reflects on pauses between inhale and exhale, moments where internal and environmental change begins. The works invite quiet attention to rhythm, seasonality, and subtle shifts that shape how we experience space and time. On view until 22 February.
9am – 8pm, Saturday to Thursday; 2pm – 8pm, Friday
Remnants | Kais Salman
Ayyam Gallery
Syrian artist Kais Salman treats painting as an unstable archive, where memory surfaces only to recede again. Faces emerge through dense, energetic brushwork, then dissolve into abstraction, debris, and erasure. Moving between figuration and disappearance, the works resist fixed identity and easy legibility, positioning the body as a site of loss, fracture, and ambiguity. Rather than offering resolution, Salman foregrounds perception as an uneasy encounter, where meaning remains provisional and incomplete. On view until 18 March.
10 – 7pm, Monday to Friday; 12 – 6pm Saturday
This Bloom I Borrow | Aïda Muluneh
Efie Gallery
Ethiopian photographer Aïda Muluneh turns inward, using allegory and colour to explore duality, self-reflection, and emotional conflict. Moving beyond documentary photography, Muluneh pushes the medium toward a painterly, symbolic language shaped by red and blue chromatic tension. Her images stage oppositions between strength and fragility, memory and pain, visibility and concealment, inviting viewers to engage through sensation rather than explanation. Art becomes a space for questioning rather than resolution, where meaning emerges through feeling, intuition, and sustained looking. On view until to 5 April.
11am – 7pm, Mondays to Saturdays
Hard Like Tears, Soft Like Glass | Shamsa Al Omaira
Iris Projects
In her first solo exhibition at Iris Projects, Shamsa Al Omaira explores childhood, care, and vulnerability through materials that oscillate between softness and threat. Familiar comforts, from bedding to jello desserts, reappear as sculptures embedded with ceramic and glass shards, questioning how fragile structures of safety are formed and undone. Developed through a year-long mentorship with curator Nadine Khalil, the exhibition marks an expansion of Al Omaira’s practice into installation, woodwork, and stitching. On view until 30 April.
11am – 7pm, Monday to Saturday
Picasso, the Figure
Louvre Abu Dhabi
This major monographic exhibition revisits Pablo Picasso through his lifelong engagement with the human figure. Bringing together landmark works from the Musée National Picasso-Paris alongside international and regional loans, the exhibition traces Picasso’s radical reinvention of form across painting, sculpture, and drawing. Moving between intimacy and distortion, the works explore enduring themes of love, identity, creation, and transformation, while also foregrounding Picasso’s lasting influence on artistic practice in the Arab world. On view until 31 May.
10am - 6:30pm, Tuesday to Thursday: 10am - 8:30pm, Friday - Sunday
Image Keepers: Photographic Works from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection
Sharjah Art Foundation
The inaugural exhibition at the Photography Gallery draws from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection to trace six decades of photographic experimentation shaped by modernisation, decolonisation, conflict, and migration. Moving across portraiture, abstraction, and materially expansive photographic practices, the works examine identity, absence, and the construction of collective memory. From intimate encounters between people and place to speculative reworkings of archives and monuments, the exhibition positions photography as a flexible tool for narrating history and imagining new forms of collectively. Curated by Jiwon Lee with the Foundation’s curatorial team. On view until 26 April.
9:00am – 9:00pm, Saturday to Thursday; Friday, 4:00pm – 9:00pm