Zeinab Saleh’s paintings carry the texture and feel of cyanotypes drained of their blues, with the artist’s latest solo show demonstrating the quiet growth of her practice.
When I lived in Abu Dhabi, I felt the city had a special Sunday morning kind of light. Unique to memories of driving downtown on Hamdan Street, soft music on the radio, shawarma and vape shops lazily gliding by along emptier roads, on the way to a brunch big and delicious enough for a later afternoon nap or tea with friends at my apartment. All the nostalgia that I feel for that time in the UAE is washed in this gentle, warm sunlight, slightly blanched as if perennially reflecting off sand. It’s the light that cats curl up in to sleep, light that feels safe, still, serene.
I don’t get to remember basking in this light enough after having moved out of the country. Yet I found it, sweetly and suddenly, permeating the paintings of Kenyan-born, Dubai-based artist Zeinab Saleh, who is presenting a solo show called The space {between} at David Zwirner London. The exhibition includes new paintings and works on paper in The Upper Room of the gallery. It’s a small and contained show, yet meditative, languid and thematically taut. Each work appears as if through a fine sheet of mist, like the early morning fog in a field, veiling the viewer’s gaze in a thin layer of gauze. This effect softens Saleh’s scenes of quotidian domesticity – hanging clothes, purring cats, branching leaves – while also lending them a dreamlike air of unreality. It’s this tension between depictions of personal, private space and a faint wash of fiction and fantasy that generates the dynamism of her paintings.
In an interview for Elephant, Saleh explains how she first organically drips “watery layers of acrylic paint” before directly pressing bits of plants, leaves and collected fabric onto it to leave prints. For paper-based works, like Untitled (2024), she uses charcoal and coloured pencil, ephemeral materials that can be rubbed, smudged and thickened at will. The result can never be predicted or perfectly replicated, adding to the evanescence of the works. You know when you’ve unexpectedly fallen into a deep sleep on the sofa and wake up with the cushion’s embroidery imprinted on your cheek? Contours and outlines emerge in these works before the facts of the image. Because what they portray doesn’t matter as much as what they suggest – an atmosphere, feelings, allusions.
Saleh was previously based in London and only relocated to the UAE relatively recently. She has previously held a solo exhibition at Camden Art Centre and enjoyed another impressive solo presentation for Tate Britain’s Art Now series last year. Where her works for the Tate were cooler in tone, swirling fog-like whites with frosted blues, pinks and peaches, those at David Zwirner lean warmer and more bluish-green, perhaps reflecting the artist’s geographical shift. Some works vividly reminded me of the sun-paled palm trees and sand-soft highways lining the UAE.
The subjects remain similar, while also further rooted in nature: small, inquisitive cats roam through the images, pawing prayer mats and lace and sheets, such as in Velvet-/glare (2024). Flora and fauna rumple like fabric, like in Undergrowth (2024). Although cats, prayer mats and henna patterns have been recurring motifs from earlier in Saleh’s practice, the influence of the Gulf landscape seems sharpened here beyond just colouring. Her newer works are also more willing to embrace abstraction and it’s a wholeheartedly fortunate growth in her practice. We don’t entirely know what’s at the centre of a painting like Three oceans away (2024), its enigma only fortified by its poetic name – and this strengthens the exhibition’s narrative. It’s like watching a poet’s voice develop, settling into its own distinction the more economical they are with their language, subtracting rather than embellishing.
Sometimes there are slivers of danger, a menacing edge. In Waiting (2024), the head of a crocodile appears above water, its one eye trained on us – there’s that tension again, between tranquil observation and the threat of what may disrupt it. As viewers, we almost adopt the very POV of the cats prowling through these spaces, tentative, vulnerable and innocent, with their quiet, feline curiosity. There’s the sense of not knowing what’s beyond the edge of the image or what could happen in the next moment. That uncertainty is animating, even within scenes that are still.
With a shiny new show in the heart of Mayfair’s blue-chip galleries, Saleh’s star is undoubtedly rising. It will be thrilling to see how her ‘voice’ develops further, how the imprints of the Gulf sink deeper into the canvas, and how her work might be exhibited within the UAE itself, in parlance with other locally based artists. Dubai’s flowering art scene has found a significant new addition to its garden.
