Until 30 August 2025, the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi is holding Between Metamorphosis and Reality, a solo exhibition by Emirati artist Maitha Abdalla that explores the boundaries between fantasy and reality. The showcase invites visitors into a dreamlike world shaped by folklore, memory, psychological inquiry, and cultural storytelling. Blending painting, sculpture, performance, and theatrical elements, Abdalla’s immersive presentation traverses themes of identity, transformation, and emotional vulnerability.
Throughout the exhibition, Abdalla’s works shift between abstraction and figuration, often populated by enigmatic characters in enclosed spaces. These figures (sometimes human, sometimes animal, sometimes hybrid) evoke feelings of containment and self-confrontation. The artist employs a hands-on technique: thick layers of paint applied with her fingers, charcoal outlines smudged and blurred, and rough textures that give the sense that each work is both a scene and a performance. This approach imbues the pieces with immediacy and emotional depth.
About the artist
Maitha Abdalla (b. 1989, Abu Dhabi) is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, photography, film, drawing, and performance. She holds a BA in Visual Arts from Zayed University (UAE, 2015); she is also a graduate of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship, in collaboration with the Rhode Island School of Design (2016-2017). She is a co-founder of Bait 15, an artist-run studio and exhibition space in Abu Dhabi that supports emerging voices in the UAE art scene.
Abdalla’s practice is deeply influenced by personal experience, including time spent teaching at an orphanage: an encounter that introduced motifs of childhood, imagination, and psychological nuance into her visual vocabulary. Her work often incorporates theatricality and ritual as lenses through which to examine internalised guilt, inherited mythologies, and the pressures of social expectation. Through rich metaphor and layered symbolism, she creates visual narratives that grapple with cycles of birth, transformation, and self-reckoning.
Abdalla has displayed her works in solo and group exhibitions across the globe, including The Power of Intention (Just as a Talisman) (Villa Cramer, Brera District, Milan, Italy, 2025); Art Dubai (2024); the Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023); Evaporating Suns (KBH. G Foundation, Basel, Switzerland, 2023); INT. The Body – Sunrise (solo) (Cromwell Place, London, UK, 2022), and many others.
Among Abdalla’s accolades are the Sheikha Manal Young Artist Award and several prestigious residencies, such as Orbis Tertius, Arts AlUla x AFALULA Residency (Paris, France, 2024), An Effort (SoHo, London, 2022), and ADMAF Visual Arts Residency Programme (Vaduz, Liechtenstein and Vienna, Austria, 2019), to name a few.
To learn more about Between Metamorphosis, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
You might also be interested in viewing Between Sunrise and Sunset, an installation by Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim.
