Emirati artist Noor Al Suwaidi’s new solo show opens a window into vulnerability

The artist experiments with new styles and colour palettes in first solo show since 2014

Emirati artist Noor Al Suwaidi's new solo show The sun is for everyone/the moon is for you at the Jossa by Alserkal gallery in Dubai. Photo: Cedric Ribeiro / Noor Al Suwaidi

The title for Emirati artist Noor Al Suwaidi’s new solo exhibition, The Sun is for Everyone/The Moon is for You at the Jossa by Alserkal gallery in Dubai came to her in a dream.

“Dreams have always had a big influence on me. I believe that as an artist, I flow between the realms of dreams and reality. This body of work represents my deepest emotions and dreams,” says the artist.

Al Suwaidi, 42, spent several hours of contemplation with friends about what title would best represent her new body of work, which is on show until June 4. But it was only when she let go and embraced fluidity and vulnerability – much like she had to do to create the nine paintings and collection of collages that use abstraction and figuration as a vehicle for her relationship with self, places and people – it came to her.

“After dedicating years enabling other artists and working in the corporate world for so long, I had a moment last year where I began questioning where my happiness lies and what I needed to do to get there. Going back to being an artist to find it was what I needed,” says Al Suwaidi, whose last solo exhibition was in 2014.

Aside from three solo exhibitions, her two-decade career in the creative industry also includes collaborations with brands, curating, leading cultural programmes, teaching part-time at Zayed University and, from 2018 to 2022, working in a corporate position with Abu Dhabi Art.

Al Suwaidi describes the exhibition as “a translation of a season of love, harmony and tension with myself, [and] with people, literature and places, through my recognisable voice of figure and abstraction, while also experimenting with new styles and palettes.

“So, there are a range of influences from my own life, novelists like Jane Austen and Paulo Coelho, the Les Nabis artist movement, and the terrain on my travels.”

The series Self Love is the most prominent departure from Al Suwaidi’s usual visual expression on canvas, as it introduces her playful side and journey of discovery through paper collages. Part of the smaller works in this exhibition, the collages are created out of craft paper with flamboyant colours cut in different shapes. The artist began with a palette for a background and then cut shapes out of different craft paper, piecing them together intuitively.

“In the early days of my practice, if I was obsessed with an image, I would create collages. If they spoke to me, I would use them as a reference for the abstractions on the canvas. For this, I decided to make them part of the main exhibition,” she says.

Al Suwaidi says that making this series gave her instant gratification. “Sometimes, in studio, you have to mess around. This was a mess around. The painting is a drawn-out process, especially when you run out of colour and must start from scratch. With these collages, the outcome was dictated by the paper. But all the shapes come from different paintings in my studio. I would look around, cut these shapes, and play around with them until the collage was born.”

The artist has honed in on an aesthetic, creating a visual language that allows her a familiarity when conversing with the canvas while also exploring new emotions through it. With Everyone and Sweet Nothings, which are acrylic on canvas paintings, she is drawn to a muted colour scheme for the first time.

“This is a new palette for me, and the paintings were an extension of my mood at the time. It would start with one colour and the others are an emotional reaction to it. I have whitewashed the canvas to make it more subdued.”

The Always Time for Love series builds on her 2021 collaboration with the brand Swatch for which she created abstractions of how love is found in places, people and nature. Al Suwaidi opts to depict that emotion with acrylic and pastel on linen for this exhibition – getting comfortable with negative space while suggesting a maturity of her practice.

“These works came close to the end of putting this show together. It was more of a process, and is a reminder of my older works, but also a diversion from it. I used to colour all over my canvasses in the past, but now you’ll see that the bare canvas, which is still primed with transparent gesso, shows in them, like skin. It’s a comment on my own vulnerability.”

In Valentine and Sicilian Summer, Al Suwaidi draws parallels between the Arabic handwriting and the curves of the human body which, the artist says, she began noticing during her time in figurative drawing classes in the US.

However, Al Suwaidi wants to open her work up to the interpretation of the viewer. Her pieces Fairy Tale and Adore may look like the abstraction of a figure at first but a few more glances can reveal a terrain instead.

“There’s a phrase in Arabic ‘Ta’tharees alwajeh’, which means contours of your face. When I travel, I always sit in the window seat and am mesmerised by the clouds and terrain, finding patterns in them. My paintings are for you to see what you want to see, and the relationship between the line and body of colours can keep shifting, and you may see something else on another day.”

The exhibition includes a panel discussion From the Studio to the Community on Wednesday, with Al Suwaidi, Lisa Ball-Lechgar, the deputy director of Tashkeel and Fiza Akram, the director of Alserkal Advisory, and moderated by Hala Khayat, the regional director of Art Dubai, from 6.30pm. The artist will also host a paper collage workshop for children aged between 6 to 12 years on June 3 from 10am.

The Sun is for Everyone/The Moon is for You runs at Jossa by Alserkal until June 4.