On view is an interdisciplinary body of work tracing Maitha Abdalla’s ongoing exploration of folklore, mythology, gender, and psychology. Blurring abstraction and poetics, she uses theatre as a lens to confront memories, fantasies, and social conditioning. Her characters, both real and imagined, are reflections of her evolving self.
About Maitha Abdalla
Multi-disciplinary artist, Maitha Abdalla's, practice combines film, photography, sculpture, painting, drawing and performance.
Abdalla harnesses the performative and constructed character of the theatre to tackle themes that range from folklore and mythology to gender, social conditioning and psychology. For the artist, the theatre is a space where she might confront and destabilize that which she has encountered in her social world, her imaginations, memories and fantasies at an objective distance. The artist's fantastical scenes shift between abstraction and representation and are charged with drama and melancholy. Abdalla's art forms an ongoing investigation into the self. She constructs characters that embody a distinct vector of her persona often constrained within tight domestic spaces that expose their vulnerability.
For Abdalla, her process is a continuation of the performance. She employs a bodily approach to painting, often applying dense layers of oil and acrylic paint with her fingertips and tracing around her own figure with gestural smears of charcoal.
