Maitha Abdalla: Scars by daylight

This solo exhibition of Maitha, at our Dubai gallery, will take place in parallel with Abu Dhabi Art’s group show Beyond: Emerging Artists which will see selected works from the same series exhibited at Cromwell Place, London during the same dates.

For her solo Maitha Abdalla has produced a body of work across varied mediums which interrogates the gravity and uncertainty of the in-between years of adolescence. Tradition, transformation and paradox are at the core of this work as the individual transitions from youth to adulthood; shifting in outer appearance, social status, and identity. Abdalla perceives this formative and liminal time in our life journey to be a dream-like moment where fantasy and reality conflate. Drawing from regional folktales, faith-based traditions and mythologies, animals are a recurring symbol throughout Abdalla’s practice; most commonly the pig and the rooster.

For Abdalla, the rooster is a creature of purity that embodies forgiveness and innocence while the pig is its opposing force, understood to be sinful in Islam. In the context of her art, this duality represents the moment when one leaves childhood where they harbour no responsibility for their actions into adulthood - a place with newfound responsibility and autonomy.

Inspired by theatre, fantasy, tradition and ritual, there’s always a performative element in Abdalla’s art. Working across mediums, the artist has produced several works on canvas, a series of photographs and an installation for this exhibition. When painting Abdalla typically uses her fingers, a process rooted in intimate expression and the transmission of her energy onto the canvas. She draws from the likes of Francis Bacon, following his unabashed portrayal of the human condition and Paula Rego who captured corrupted folklore through her magical realist paintings. Like Bacon, Abdalla’s palette is often muted pointing to the darkness and multifaceted meanings that her childhood folktales come to embody while her introduction of pastel pink holds kitsch, gendered connotations. Her scenes take place in intimate indoor settings where personal dreams and angsts might take action. The bathroom is the backdrop for her installations and photographs. For Abdalla, it’s a space where cleansing and grooming rituals, as well as self-reflection, take place and where the idea of adolescent transformation is pronounced most heavily with the body laid bare before the mirror.