Bahraini artist Hisham Sharif’s first Dubai exhibition, “Allusive Veil,” draws on the end of his engagement in 2023 and the relationships that followed. The exhibition runs at Ayyam Gallery in Dubai until October 30, 2026, and marks one of Sharif’s first sustained experiments with colour after years of largely monochromatic work.
Heartbreak and return to painting
Sharif was due to marry in 2023, but the wedding was called off. “I was so close to getting married, and then my fiancee broke up with me,” he said. His earlier body of work, mostly monochrome, ends with a wedding and a dancing scene.
Around the time of the breakup, Sharif’s father, celebrated painter Abdul Rahim Sharif, fell ill. Hisham Sharif stopped painting to help his father recover while grieving the end of the relationship. His father recovered by the summer of 2023, and Sharif returned to painting, eager to “make up for lost time.”
Many works in “Allusive Veil” draw on the relationships that followed, as well as Persian miniatures and stories, including Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh.” The exhibition moves from heartbreak and romantic pursuit towards acceptance, spirituality and inner peace.
In “Behind the Mirror,” a woman scowls at the viewer in a mirror as she pulls away from a man sitting beside her on a bed. The perspective puts the viewer between the bed and the mirror, as if standing beside a console table. The woman might also be read as Sharif’s own perspective, reconsidering the relationship while looking at himself in the mirror. Like the other paintings in the exhibition, he made the work after the breakup.
Orientalist images and a personal gaze
About a third of the exhibition depicts women in rooms filled with textiles and flowers. Some compositions evoke late-19th-century Orientalist painting, with women appearing to pose for the painter or viewer amid elements of eroticism and exoticism.
One painting shows a leopard reclining on a couch beside a woman wearing a similarly spotted dress. The image recalls a trope in 19th-century European paintings of the region. The article cites French painter Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant’s “A Royal Palace in Morocco” and “The Odalisque,” which suggest a metaphor between women and captured, tamed wild cats.
Sharif rejects that interpretation as a description of his intentions. He said painters such as Benjamin-Constant and Eugene Delacroix depicted Arab-world scenes and interiors, particularly in Morocco and Algeria, through a detached, eroticising lens, while he is present 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].”
Mirrors and reflections contain Sharif’s visage or a suggestion of it. Feverish dabs of colour fill the paintings, and their forms resist settling into a whole, conveying 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.”
From pursuit to acceptance
The textures and colours have prompted questions about whether the paintings unintentionally reproduce fantastical Orientalist tropes or subvert them through Sharif’s romantic experiences and vulnerability. The women can be interpreted as imagined distortions of his former fiancee or as expressions of longing; how viewers understand the work may depend on them.
A second group of paintings uses animal symbolism to explore romantic pursuit. Leopards hunt gazelles in scenes painted with the same febrile energy. Sharif said he often encountered that chase in Persian miniature painting, while leaving ambiguous which animal represents whom.
The final works largely omit figures and animals. They depict gardens and plant life, include some of the exhibition’s largest canvases, and carry reflective titles such as “Solitude.” Sharif describes them as the conclusion of a years-long recovery from the breakup, quitting drinking and finding stability in religion. Their colours remain vivid, while their compositions appear to have come from a steadier hand.
Sharif called the exhibition a “roller coaster of emotion.” “It starts with heartbreak and trying to figure it out, going chase after chase, into then acceptance, trying to find contentment and peace of mind. I replaced the masculine and the feminine, the cheetah and the gazelle, with plants. It was the aftermath of a journey through hell to get over the break-up.”