Hisham Sharif was due to marry in 2023. The wedding never happened. “I was so close to getting married, and then my fiancee broke up with me,” the Bahraini artist said. Three years later, that rupture drives “Allusive Veil,” his first solo exhibition in Dubai, at Ayyam Gallery until October 30, 2026.
The show marks one of Sharif’s first full experiments with colour. He had worked largely in monochrome, and that earlier body of work ends with a wedding and a dancing scene.
A Private Crisis, Twice Over
The breakup wasn’t the only blow. Around the same time, Sharif’s father, the celebrated painter Abdul Rahim Sharif, fell ill. Hisham stopped painting to help his father recover while grieving the end of the relationship.
By the summer of 2023, his father had recovered. Sharif returned to the canvas, eager to “make up for lost time.”
Many paintings 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 toward acceptance, spirituality and inner peace. Sharif calls it a “roller coaster of emotion.” “It was the aftermath of a journey through hell to get over the break-up,” he said.
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 viewer stands between the bed and the mirror. The woman could also represent Sharif’s own perspective, reconsidering the relationship and looking at herself.
Whose Gaze Is It?
About a third of the show depicts women in rooms filled with textiles and flowers. Some compositions evoke late-19th-century Orientalist painting, seemingly posing the women for the painter or viewer, with elements of eroticism and exoticism. In one canvas, a leopard reclines on a couch beside a woman wearing a similarly spotted dress. The image recalls a trope in 19th-century European paintings of the region, including 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 reading of his intentions. He said painters such as Benjamin-Constant and Eugene Delacroix depicted Arab-world scenes, particularly in Morocco and Algeria, through a detached, eroticising lens. He says 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].”
He also pointed to his upbringing. “I live around this furniture, these carpets. I also had the opportunity of having cheetahs. People in Bahrain, in the Arab world, have these ideas of collecting big cats.”
The paintings’ textures and colours raise a question: do they unintentionally reproduce fantastical Orientalist tropes, or subvert them through Sharif’s romantic experiences and vulnerability? The women could also be imagined distortions of his former fiancee, or expressions of longing. How the work lands may depend on the viewer. Mirrors and reflections carry Sharif’s visage, or a suggestion of it, while feverish dabs of colour stop the forms from settling into a whole.
Vulnerability and Recovery
Sharif says he chose to be open. “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.”
Another group of paintings uses animal symbolism to explore romantic pursuit. Leopards hunt gazelles with the same febrile energy. Sharif said he often encountered that chase in Persian miniature painting, and he leaves it unclear which animal represents whom.
The final works largely leave out figures and animals. They show 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 that included quitting drinking and finding stability in religion. The colours remain vivid. He appears to have painted the compositions with a steadier hand.
“I replaced the masculine and the feminine, the cheetah and the gazelle, with plants,” he said.
Why This Matters: This is a cultural story, not a political one, but it touches questions of representation that run through coverage of the Arab world. Sharif argues over who holds the brush and whose eyes do the looking, answering with an insider’s perspective rather than an outsider’s. He also speaks about grief, intimacy and emotional silence, subjects he says people rarely discuss. That’s a human dimension often missing from how the region is pictured. Viewers can decide whether the work subverts or echoes Orientalist tropes, and the show runs in Dubai through October 30.