Literature

High Spirits marks a pivotal moment in Nasser Almulhim’s artistic journey, expanding his exploration of abstraction into new material and emotional dimensions. Comprising a series of paintings, a sculptural work, and an installation, the exhibition continues the artist’s long-standing dialogue with geometry, colour, and spiritual consciousness while introducing a heightened attention to scale and spatial vibration through the installation. The works on view exist between structure and surrender, embodying what Almulhim describes as “the constant movement between chaos and clarity.”

High Spirits is energy made visible. The artist questions how colour might stir the unconscious, how geometry can chart inner terrain, and how abstraction can act as a passage toward transcendence. While his earlier works revealed meditative fields of pigment, gestures layered to expose depth beneath surface, this new body of work brings that meditative energy into physical space. The accompanying installation and sculpture extends painting into the realm of experience, inviting viewers to enter the chromatic world his canvases evoke.

Born in Riyadh in 1988, Almulhim studied studio art in Florida before returning to Saudi Arabia, where he has become part of a growing generation of artists shaping the region’s contemporary abstraction. His formative years in the United States exposed him to post-war American abstraction and theories of colour-field painting, yet his practice remains firmly grounded in regional legacy. The geometry of desert architecture, the rhythmic logic of Islamic ornamentation, and the chromatic intensity of local light all inform his compositions. Through them, Almulhim proposes a visual language that mediates between geographies, between modernist formalism and Sufi metaphysics.

Central to his process is the belief that painting is a form of therapy, a spiritual practice of release and renewal. “Every canvas,” he notes, “is a mirror and a meditation. It begins in emotion and ends in reflection.” This psychological depth becomes more pronounced in High Spirits, where the artist returns to Jungian theory and the practice of shadow work to investigate what lies beneath surface perception. The resulting compositions, saturated fields of cobalt, vermilion, and verdant green giving way to midnight blue, ochre, and near-white accents, suggest a tension between revelation and concealment.

In both the paintings and the three-dimensional works, colour holds the potential for transformation. Gestures coalesce into geometric order or dissolve into organic silhouettes. Figures are hinted at but never realised, leaving the works suspended in a state of becoming - open, alive, and charged with the viewer’s own reading.