In 2023, Hisham Sharif was close to the altar when his fiancée ended their relationship. “I was so close to getting married, and then my fiancée broke up with me,” the Bahraini artist said. Three years later, that moment’s wreckage fills his first solo exhibition in Dubai, “Allusive Veil,” at Ayyam Gallery. The show runs until October 30, 2026.
A Break With Monochrome
The exhibition marks one of Sharif’s first full experiments with colour. For years, people knew him for a largely monochromatic approach. His earlier body of work ends with a wedding and a dancing scene.
The breakup wasn’t the only blow that year. Around the same time, his father, celebrated painter Abdul Rahim Sharif, fell ill. Hisham stopped painting to help his father recover, all while grieving the relationship’s end. By the summer of 2023, his father had recovered, and Sharif returned to the canvas, eager to “make up for lost time.”
Many paintings in “Allusive Veil” draw on the relationships that followed, as well as Persian miniatures and stories, including Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh.” The show moves from heartbreak and romantic pursuit toward acceptance, spirituality, and inner peace.
Orientalism and the Question of Who’s Looking
About a third of the exhibition depicts women in rooms filled with textiles and flowers. Some compositions recall late-19th-century Orientalist painting. The women seem posed for the painter or viewer, with hints of eroticism and exoticism. In one canvas, a leopard reclines on a couch beside a woman wearing a similarly spotted dress, a familiar 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,” which suggest a metaphor linking women with captured, tamed wild cats.
Sharif rejects that interpretation 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. He says he appears in his own work. “I am Bahrani born and bred. But I’m fully Persian; my parents are Persian,” 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 doesn’t deny the resemblance. “I understand how people could relate [the work] to Orientalism but I always say these are the things I also grew up with. 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 have prompted questions: do they unintentionally repeat Orientalist tropes, or challenge them through Sharif’s romantic experiences and vulnerability? The women might also be imagined distortions of his former fiancée, or expressions of longing. Viewers may decide for themselves.
Vulnerability, Then Stillness
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 bed and mirror. The woman might also represent Sharif’s own perspective as he reconsiders the relationship. Elsewhere in the show, mirrors hold his visage, or a suggestion of it.
Colour arrives in feverish dabs. Forms resist settling into a whole. They convey drama, tension, and desire. “I went through a lot of heartbreak and personal pain. And wanted to be vulnerable,” Sharif 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 draws on animal symbolism. 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. Gardens and plant life take their place; the paintings include some of the exhibition’s largest canvases and carry reflective titles such as “Solitude.” Sharif describes them as the end of a years-long recovery, which included quitting drinking and finding stability in religion. The colours stay vivid, though the compositions look steadier.
He calls the show 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.”
Why This Matters: This isn’t a story about security or statecraft, and it shouldn’t be stretched into one. But it does show an artist from the Gulf claiming authorship over how his own world is pictured, rather than leaving the task to outside observers. Sharif names the Western gaze of Benjamin-Constant and Delacroix, then answers it with an Arab-Persian one. He also says openly that his region rarely discusses intimacy and vulnerability. Whether viewers see the canvases as subversion or echo, the show remains at Ayyam Gallery in Dubai until October 30, 2026, and the judgment belongs to them.