Within Me Art Dubai
We all carry stories within us; they reside in the body as colour and warmth, in fleeting dreams, in the ache of people and places once known. Taking this idea as a point of departure, Within Me considers what occurs when interior states assume material form. Across painting, sculpture, etching and mixed media, through abstraction, figuration and hybrid mythic language, the selected artists externalise what is held within. They mediate on experiences of loss, displacement and hybrid existence which they transmute into vitality, sensual charge, chromatic intensity and an acute attentiveness to habitat. Within Me spans two generations and four geographies, yet the artists share a single recurring conviction: that nature is where interior life finds form. Irene Scheinmann, working from displacement and modernist tradition, mapped this territory first. Rema Ghuloum, Randa Maddah and Hashel Al Lamki each arrive at the same ground later through their own histories, materials and ways of seeing.
Rema Ghuloum approaches interiority - personal loss and the turns of lived experience - through abstraction and a quest for beauty. Pigment accrues in chromatic strata, sanded back and reworked until the surface appears to generate its own atmosphere. Based in California but with mixed Middle Eastern heritage, she paints with the memory of multiple horizons. Two large-scale canvases, one in sunflower yellow and the other in sapphire blue, summon shifts in light, distant skies and coastlines brought into proximity. A third work, Flame (2024) moves into a deeper register: mauve, merlot and midnight blue establish a dense ground from which flashes of fresh green and flame emerge. These accents rise through shadow like heat through ash, suggesting an interior combustion at the core of the composition, the fire within.
Rema turns to abstraction to release that which cannot easily be articulated, while Randa Maddah conjures her interior world through a symbolic ecology. Within her work circulate myth, spirituality and a conviction that human life is inseparable from its habitat. Raised in the Golan Heights, she draws on local folklore, lived political tension and fragments of childhood dreams, assembling figures that drift between human, animal and vegetal states. Her language moves through the subconscious, invoking surrealist inflexions to construct terrain that feels luminous and unmoored.
Across a triptych of oil on canvas, skies swirl in saturated tangerine and plum as intimate narrative scenes unfold. Rebirth, continuity and spiritual connection are staged within contained yet densely charged compositions. Her paintings feel like tiny cosmologies grounded in the gardens and mountainous landscapes of her upbringing, even as they slip toward dream. Scale is restrained, yet the emotional register is expansive. Her vision moves from canvas into clay. Sculptural figures rise from the same imaginative ground as the paintings, limbs elongated, surfaces worked by hand
before entering the kiln. Clay records touch and absorbs heat, capturing transformation within the surface; in Randa’s work, the inner life of the body finds continuity in the cycles of the earth.
Hashel Al Lamki carries a different kind of interior life, one absorbed into the body of the land. His polyptych Part-Time Lovers (2025), natural pigments, oil, oil pastel and glitter on tent fabric and leather, maps the natural cycles of seasons across an imagined landscape while absorbing the weight of pressing environmental concerns. Al Lamki observes climactic changes that transcend the lifespan of a single human being: unusual rain patterns, cloud formations, tectonic shifts, and reflects on their profound impact on geopolitics and the human experience. Inspired by the relationship between the moon and the sun and the way they complement one another, he draws a parallel between natural forces and the delicate balance they maintain. In his composition, clouds draw closer to mountains, and at certain points, sky and earth seem indistinguishable. What is held within, here, is geological, a world in slow transformation that the body registers long before the mind can summon its name.
Conversing with these contemporary visions, modernist Irene Scheinmann was born in the 1930s, yet she shares similar impulses. Displaced from Baghdad to Britain, she distils this distance into her compositions. In an ink-hued etching, a moonrise emits oneiric intensity; in an oil painting, pursed, pink lips trace the contour of a hillside, binding body and terrain along a shared horizon. With a restrained palette, she constructs worlds where land and figure incline toward one another, suggesting an intimacy in which geology carries emotion, and the body absorbs place. Subtle figuration enters, positioning corporeal presence within elemental form. Informed by modernist vocabularies encountered in Europe and imprinted with diasporic passage, Irene engages the natural world as a site through which to articulate longing, rupture and imagined journeys.
The four artists exhibited here carry distinct worlds within them. They offer four ways of rendering interior life tangible - through abstraction and atmosphere, through the metamorphic body, through the elemental forces of land and season, through dream-inflected terrain, suggesting that the most consequential territories are those carried within the self.
