Bahraini artist Hisham Sharif’s first Dubai exhibition, “Allusive Veil,” follows the emotional aftermath of his engagement ending in 2023 and the relationships that came afterward. The show runs at Ayyam Gallery in Dubai until October 30, 2026. Its paintings mark one of Sharif’s first full experiments with colour, a departure from the largely monochromatic work that had defined his practice.
From heartbreak 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 breakup, Sharif’s father, celebrated painter Abdul Rahim Sharif, fell ill. Hisham Sharif stopped painting to help his father recover as he grieved 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 toward 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 places viewers between the bed and the mirror, as if they’re watching from beside a console table. The woman may also represent Sharif’s own perspective as he reconsiders the relationship while looking at himself in the mirror. Like the other paintings in the show, he made this work in the years after the breakup.
Persian references and the question of Orientalism
About a third of the exhibition depicts women in rooms filled with textiles and flowers. Some compositions evoke late-19th-century Orientalist painting, showing women posed for the painter or viewer and drawing on eroticism and exoticism.
One painting shows a leopard reclining on a couch beside a woman in 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 brings his own presence to the 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 in the paintings contain 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.”
Pursuit and recovery
The paintings’ textures and colours have prompted questions about whether they reproduce fantastical Orientalist tropes or subvert them through Sharif’s romantic experiences and vulnerability. The women might be read as imagined distortions of his former fiancee or expressions of longing; the viewer may decide how to understand the work.
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 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 from the breakup, quitting drinking and finding stability in religion. Their colours remain vivid, but the compositions look as if he painted them with 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.”