The art season is in full swing. We are now weeks away from a rescheduled Art Dubai and in the middle of Alserkal Art Month, plus local galleries are pressing ahead with numerous exciting exhibitions across the country.
Current highlights include Picasso, The Figure at Louvre Abu Dhabi, a focused look at the artist’s reinvention of the human body, and 13 Cents at Foundry in Dubai, where Abdulla Elmaz’s staged photographs chart a movement from anger to vulnerability.
Major institutional shows across Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah continue to take stock of artistic practice in the region – including reflective group exhibitions, landmark solo presentations, photography exhibitions and landscape-led shows.
Here are 13 exhibitions to see now in the UAE.
1. Hard Like Tears, Soft Like Glass at MiZa
Iris Projects is showing the first solo exhibition by Shamsa Al Omaira, a multidisciplinary artist and designer who lives in Abu Dhabi.
Hosted at MiZa at Port Zayed, the exhibition focuses on Al Omaira’s exploration of duality, drawing on images of childhood comfort and security. Familiar references such as bedding and jello desserts are reimagined as soft-looking sculptural works embedded with elements of risk, including ceramic and glass shards.
The show is presented as part of Iris's wider programme and follows a year-long mentorship with curator and art critic Nadine Khalil. The process supports the development of Al Omaira’s practice and encourages experimentation with new materials and formats, including woodwork, stitching and installation-based works.
Until April 30; Abu Dhabi
2. 13 Cents at Foundry
Australian photographer Abdulla Elmaz’s debut solo exhibition brings together 24 staged photographs that trace a movement from anger and rupture towards vulnerability and acceptance.
Developed over four years, the works unfold as single-image narratives shaped by personal and professional conflict, with recurring motifs of suspended cars, fractured homes, red-drenched figures and carefully constructed cinematic sets.
The exhibition also reflects Elmaz’s insistence on photography as a handmade, authored form, even as digital tools are used selectively in the final image-making process.
Until April 30; Dubai
3. Ahaad Alamoudi: Sunkissed at Sharjah Art Foundation
This solo exhibition by Jeddah-based artist Ahaad Alamoudi brings together recent and newly commissioned works that reflect on identity and visual culture in a rapidly changing Gulf landscape. Drawing on familiar symbols such as the sun and sand, the exhibition considers how these motifs have come to represent the region’s shifting ecologies and ambitions.
Working across installations, image-making, and object-based forms, Alamoudi explores the intersection of collective identity and contemporary aesthetics.
Her works incorporate elements of pop culture and everyday life, from viral memes to toy cars and falcons, using humour and repetition to examine how ideas of development and progress are absorbed and reinterpreted.
The exhibition also looks at how communication unfolds between past and future, tracing gestures, behaviours and material culture as they are reshaped over time.
Through this approach, Alamoudi reflects on the tension between large-scale transformation and its lived experience.
Curated by Amal Al Ali, the exhibition is presented in Gallery 6 at Al Mureijah Square.
Until May 3; Sharjah
4. Deja Vu at Concrete, Alserkal Avenue
Bringing together more than 50 artists represented by 20 galleries, Deja Vu is a multi-gallery exhibition conceived as a collective response to the current pressures facing the UAE’s art sector.
Staged at Concrete in Alserkal Avenue, the selling exhibition spans painting, photography and installation, drawing on works from some of the region’s leading contemporary programmes.
Curated by Kevin Jones, Nada Raza and Zaina Zaarour in consultation with participating galleries, the show takes its title from Raed Yassin’s 2016 neon work and unfolds across three strands: the uncanny, historical absurdity and linguistic slippage.
These themes examine the instability of memory, the repetition of political and cultural cycles, and the limits of language in shaping shared understanding.
Artists include Samira Abbassy, Nabil Anani, Ammar Al Attar, Samuel Fosso, Larissa Sansour and Seher Shah, reflecting a range of practices shaped by both regional and international contexts.
Until May 8; Dubai
5. All at Once at JD Malat Gallery
Bringing together 12 international artists, the exhibition explores ideas of continuity, resilience and optimism. All at Once includes works by Zhang Ji, Gary Lang, Conrad Jon Godly, Kojo Marfo, Santiago Parra, Sophie-Yen Bretez, Tim Kent, Ur Kasin, Richard Wathen, Yann Leto, Henrik Uldalen and Lu Xinjian.
Moving between abstraction, figuration and landscape, the show reflects on uncertainty and renewal through a range of visual languages.
Highlights include Ji’s architecturally influenced compositions, Lang’s immersive colour fields, Marfo’s works on identity and cultural memory, and Wathen’s psychologically charged portraits.
Until May 15; Dubai
6. Move, pause, return at Gallery Isabelle
Marking Gallery Isabelle’s 20th anniversary, Move, pause, return unfolds over 20 days, with one work unveiled each day in the lead-up to a full exhibition bringing the pieces together. The show features works by artists including Hassan Sharif, Bahman Jalali, Mohammed Kazem, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Bita Fayyazi, Lara Baladi, Fereydoun Ave, Shaikha Al Mazrou, Manal Al Dowayan and Jumairy.
Each work is paired with a short text by an emerging curator, independent writer or practitioner from across the region, creating a parallel layer of reflection.
Presented both in the gallery and online, the project takes shape as a gradual, cumulative exhibition, while also serving as a moment of gathering for the Dubai art community.
The original show culminates in a reception on April 11, before remaining on view through late May.
Until May 28; Dubai
7. From the Perspective of Language at The Third Line
Sara Naim’s latest exhibition brings together painting and performance to examine how meaning is constructed through language and images.
The Syrian artist, who lives in London, moves between figuration and abstraction in a series of large-scale canvases where fragments of anatomical, botanical and digital imagery are layered across softly shifting colour fields.
Alongside the paintings, the video work <i>Mother Practices Her Tongue</i> reduces speech to its physical components, with repeated sounds breaking down into gesture and noise. Across the exhibition, Naim questions the stability of both language and visual representation, suggesting that what we perceive is always partial and mediated.
Until May 31; Dubai
8. Picasso, The Figure at Louvre Abu Dhabi
The Picasso, The Figure exhibition offers a focused examination of how Pablo Picasso transformed representations of the human body in modern art.
Drawn largely from the collection of the Musee National Picasso–Paris, the exhibition traces Picasso’s engagement with the figure across seven decades, shaped by formal experimentation, political upheaval and personal experience.
It advances a central argument that Picasso remained fundamentally committed to the human figure, even when his work appeared to dismantle representation.
Rather than following a chronological structure, the exhibition is organised around recurring approaches that defined his treatment of the body, including schematisation, hybridisation, petrification and stylisation.
These themes chart the evolution of his figures from early Cubist symbols to the monumental bodies of the 1920s, the hybrid forms of Surrealism and the fractured, urgent figures of his later years.
Until May 31; Abu Dhabi
9. Reflections: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Villain Collection at Bassam Freiha Art Foundation
The exhibition draws from the private collection of Abu Dhabi-based patrons Fairouz and Jean-Paul Villain.
Organised into three sections, the show brings together modern and contemporary works from across the Arab world, encouraging connections beyond geography and chronology.
The Levant-focused opening explores themes of conflict, displacement and intimacy through artists such as Etel Adnan and Paul Guiragossian.
A North African section highlights continuity in artistic traditions, while the final section celebrates Emirati pioneers and contemporary voices, reflecting the collectors’ long-standing ties to Abu Dhabi and the local art scene.
Until May 31; Abu Dhabi
10. Of Land and Water at Kalba Ice Factory
Of Land and Water marks the first presentation of works from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection in the emirate's east coast.
The exhibition presents large-scale works by nine international artists and collectives. The works ponder upon how borders sever stretches of open land and sea, dividing inhabitants and impacting their daily lives.
Until May 31; Sharjah
11. Spectra of the Beautiful Past at Bait Sheikh Saeed bin Hamad Al Qasimi
Taking place in the heritage house in Kalba, Sharjah, the exhibition brings together works by prominent Emirati artists, including Abdulrahim Salem and Najat Makki. The works on display are meant to evoke nostalgia and an appreciation for a bygone era.
The exhibition’s venue underscores its themes. The venue was built at the turn of the 20th century by Saeed bin Hamad Al Qasimi, the ruler of Kalba, and named after him.
Until May 31; Sharjah
12. Jorge Tacla: Time the destroyer is time the preserver at Sharjah Art Foundation
This major solo exhibition by Chilean artist Jorge Tacla brings together works spanning more than four decades of a practice shaped by political upheaval and questions of representation.
Tacla has worked between Santiago and New York since the early 1980s and Tacla draws on personal and historical memory, informed in part by the legacy of Chile’s 1973 coup, to examine how violence and human rights are understood and recorded.
Structured across eight chapters, the exhibition presents large-scale paintings and works on paper that reflect on the shifting nature of witnessing.
Tacla’s compositions often depict architecture and landscapes in the negative, with forms defined through absence rather than presence, foregrounding the role of perception and memory in constructing meaning.
The title, drawn from a line by TS Eliot, frames a broader enquiry into destruction and preservation, as the works consider the afterlife of traumatic events and the hierarchies that shape how suffering is remembered.
Until June 7; Sharjah
13. Urdu Worlds at Ishara Art Foundation
Urdu Worlds is the UAE’s first contemporary art exhibition dedicated to the Urdu language.
Curated by Hammad Nasar, the exhibition stages a visual and conceptual dialogue between the late Indian-American printmaker Zarina and the Pakistani artist Ali Kazim.
Replace "It" with a specific noun (for example: "The exhibition marks the first comprehensive presentation of Kazim’s work in the Gulf and brings his practice into conversation with Zarina’s long-standing engagement with language, memory and abstraction.") marks the first comprehensive presentation of Kazim’s work in the Gulf and brings his practice into conversation with Zarina’s long-standing engagement with language, memory and abstraction.
Although shaped by different generations and geographies, both artists draw deeply on Urdu literature and thought. Zarina frequently incorporates Urdu poetry and text into her prints, while Kazim’s paintings are informed by Urdu fiction and verse, shaping his reflections on landscape, history and everyday life.
Until June 13; Dubai
