Ahead of Nasser Almulhim's exhibition "On In-Between", which opened on 6 June 2024 at Tabari Artspace in Dubai, Arab News interviewed the Saudi painter about growing up in Riyadh's Al-Malaz neighbourhood as one of seven siblings, and about the depression he manages through prayer and walking barefoot in nature.
The interview describes paintings built from floating geometric forms and open fields of colour, work Almulhim frames as therapeutic - "beauty is needed for your soul", he told the paper - and as a way of drawing on the Lebanese artist Etel Adnan's insistence that beauty still has a place in contemporary art. "On In-Between" itself is presented as an exploration of psychological stages moving between consciousness and the subconscious.
The piece also traces his path into painting: engineering studies abandoned for fine art at the University of West Florida, encouraged by peers, with a poet grandmother and a father who practised analogue photography as early influences. Almulhim told Arab News he hopes to set up art-residency exchanges with artists from Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan, a plan he linked partly to the war in Gaza, and that he would eventually like to pursue a doctorate in art therapy.
