Dazed MENA's profile of Miramar Al Nayyar introduced the 28-year-old Iraqi artist, who works between Amman and Abu Dhabi, describing her largely self-taught practice across painting, installation and material experimentation as an act of translation, movement rendered into matter, intuition rendered into form.
The piece focused on Al Nayyar's method of building layered surfaces from pigment and mineral, combining oil paint, stone dust, airbrush and glaze into works that read at once as gestures of Arabic calligraphy and as records of desert geology. The desert itself has become central to her recent output, treated in the profile not as a subject to be pictured but as, in its own words, "a state of being: vast, patient, and mutable", a condition the work tries to embody rather than merely depict. Solitude, the piece noted, is essential to how Al Nayyar works, giving her the isolation needed to let those layered surfaces build slowly.
The profile also set Al Nayyar's practice within a wider generational shift, citing her SEAF grant and the Prince Claus Fund's SEED Award among the recognitions marking her rise, and quoting her call for "less westernisation, more honesty" in the region's art scene. That framing positioned her as part of a younger cohort of Gulf and Levantine artists gaining international attention through material rather than overtly political subject matter.
