Vogue Arabia included Maitha Abdalla in 6 Emerging Arab Female Artists You Need to Know, a 2025 round-up feature profiling women artists working across painting, sculpture and multimedia practice throughout the Arab world. The list format situates each artist within a wider generational moment rather than reviewing a single body of work, pairing a short introduction with a look at where each artist's practice was heading.
Abdalla's inclusion reflects a practice built over roughly a decade: surreal, folklore-inflected paintings and performances that draw on childhood dreams and stories told by her grandmother, worked in dense layers of oil and acrylic applied with her fingertips and populated by human-and-animal hybrid figures, roosters and pigs recurring most often as symbols of purity and transgression drawn from Gulf storytelling. By 2025 that work had been shown at Tabari Artspace, in the Sharjah Biennial 15 and at Japan's Aichi Triennale.
Being named among emerging Arab women artists in 2025 marked a point where Abdalla's regional and institutional profile had grown well beyond her early Dubai and Abu Dhabi exhibitions. Maitha Abdalla, an Emirati artist based between Khorfakkan and Dubai, is represented by Tabari Artspace, at https://tabariartspace.com/artists/154-maitha-abdalla/.
