Bahraini artist Hisham Sharif’s first Dubai exhibition, “Allusive Veil,” follows the work he made after his engagement ended in 2023. Ayyam Gallery in Dubai hosts the exhibition until October 30, 2026. It also marks one of Sharif’s first full experiments with colour after years of painting mostly in monochrome.
“I was so close to getting married, and then my fiancee broke up with me,” Sharif said. His earlier body of work ends with a wedding and a dancing scene. Around the breakup, his father, celebrated painter Abdul Rahim Sharif, fell ill. Hisham Sharif stopped painting to help his father recover as he grieved the relationship’s end. By the summer of 2023, his father had recovered, and Sharif returned to painting, eager to “make up for lost time.”
The gaze in the room
Many paintings draw on relationships that followed, along with Persian miniatures and stories, including Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh.” The exhibition shifts from heartbreak and romantic pursuit toward acceptance, spirituality and inner peace. In “Behind the Mirror,” a woman scowls at the viewer while pulling away from a man seated beside her on a bed. The perspective places the viewer between the bed and mirror, as though watching from beside a console table. The woman might also reflect Sharif’s own perspective, reconsidering the relationship as he looks at himself in the mirror.
About a third of the exhibition shows women in rooms filled with textiles and flowers. Some compositions recall late-19th-century Orientalist paintings, posing women for the painter or viewer and blending eroticism with exoticism. In one, a leopard reclines beside a woman wearing a similarly spotted dress, recalling a trope in 19th-century European paintings of the region. The article cites Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant’s “A Royal Palace in Morocco” and “The Odalisque,” where women and captured, tamed wild cats suggest a metaphor.
Sharif rejects that reading as a description of his intentions. He said Benjamin-Constant and Eugene Delacroix depicted Arab-world scenes and interiors, particularly in Morocco and Algeria, through a detached, eroticising lens, while he appears in his own work. “I am Bahrani born and bred. But I'm fully Persian; my parents are Persian. These are things I associate with our Persian culture,” he said. “With Orientalism, it was a western gaze into the Arab world. With this, this is my Arab-Persian gaze into our world. I can take you to houses in Bahrain that seem like Delacroix [paintings].”
Heartbreak, pursuit, aftermath
Mirrors and reflections hold Sharif’s visage, or a suggestion of it. Feverish dabs of colour and forms that resist settling into a whole convey drama, tension and desire. “I went through a lot of heartbreak and personal pain. And wanted to be vulnerable,” he said. “I’ve rarely encountered artists who spoke about intimacy and relationships and vulnerability. We never bring these topics up. There’s this emotional gap.”
The work allows competing readings: viewers may see fantastical Orientalist tropes or understand the paintings through Sharif’s romantic experience and vulnerability. The women might be imagined distortions of his former fiancee, or figures of longing. Sharif said he understood why people might connect the work to Orientalism, but added that he grew up around the furniture and carpets depicted and had the opportunity to have cheetahs. “People in Bahrain, in the Arab world, have these ideas of collecting big cats.”
Another group of paintings uses animal symbolism to explore romantic pursuit. Leopards hunt gazelles in scenes painted with the same feverish energy. Sharif said he often encountered that chase in Persian miniature painting, while leaving ambiguous which animal represents whom. The final works largely leave out figures and animals. Gardens and plant life fill some of the exhibition’s largest canvases, including works with reflective titles such as “Solitude.” Sharif describes them as the end of a years-long recovery from the breakup, quitting drinking and finding stability in religion. Their colours remain vivid, but he paints the compositions with a steadier hand.
Sharif called the exhibition a “roller coaster of emotion.” It starts with heartbreak and pursuit, then turns toward acceptance and contentment. “I replaced the masculine and the feminine, the cheetah and the gazelle, with plants,” he said. “It was the aftermath of a journey through hell to get over the break-up.”