Literature

Almaha Jaralla’s recent body of work turns to the evolving built environment of Abu Dhabi. Working in oil on canvas, she examines contemporary architectural projects that have come to define the city’s expanding urban landscape, approaching them through a visual language structured by line, repetition, and fragmentation. Her paintings register these sites as lived and observed spaces, tracing how familiarity is constructed through daily encounter.
Jaralla’s compositions are organised through architectural scaffolding: linear grids, intersecting planes and receding facades that allude to new developments rising across the capital. Yet these structures rarely settle into stable perspective. Edges dissolve, planes tilt and segments appear suspended within fields of colour. The result is a pictorial space that hovers between recognition and abstraction, as though the city were being recalled in flashes.Within these fragmented environments, brief eruptions of local plant life punctuate the architectural field. Bougainvillea, rendered in soft yet saturated tones, threads through concrete and glass. These botanical presences operate as chromatic interruptions, recalling older residential districts and domestic gardens that persist alongside large scale construction. Their insertion introduces a temporal layering in which rapid urban expansion coexists with slower, organic growth.

Swirling pastel hues wash across surfaces in veils of lilac, pale turquoise and rose, lending the compositions a dreamlike atmosphere. These tonal shifts temper the rigidity of structural line, producing an oscillation between solidity and diffusion. The city emerges as at once tangible and elusive, grounded in specific sites yet refracted through memory and perception.
Jaralla’s paintings therefore articulate contemporary architecture as an experiential condition. Through fragmentation, colour and vegetal motif, she offers a meditation on how environments are internalised, reconfigured, and imagined anew.