JD Malat Gallery Dubai presents Points of View, its annual Summer Group Exhibition, bringing together a broad selection of contemporary practices that consider how individual perception shapes our understanding of the world. Open until 15 September 2026, the show creates a varied conversation around memory, identity, history, place, emotion, and imagination.
The exhibition’s central idea is reflected in the considerable range of approaches represented in the gallery. Some artists translate the world into abstract languages, while others rely on recognisable bodies, interiors, landscapes, or fragments of text. The resulting dialogue suggests that perception is more than observing what is already there. It is an active process, shaped by cultural background, personal memory, and emotional experience.
Among the participating creatives is American artist Andy Moses, whose Geomorphology 1108 (2025) uses acrylic on canvas to create an iridescent, richly layered surface. Associated with Lyrical Abstraction, the artist creates works that suggest geological, atmospheric, or cosmic phenomena. Moses’ paintings change with movement and light, making perception itself part of the work.
The exhibition also displays Edward #2 (2008) by Ed Moses (1926–2018), an important figure on the post-war Los Angeles art scene. This painting exemplifies his interest in the tension between structure and unpredictability. Grids, stains, gestures, and layers produce surfaces in which transparency and instability become formal subjects in their own right.
A very different visual language appears in the work of Ghanaian-British artist Kojo Marfo, whose practice draws on Cubism with imagery rooted in Akan artistic traditions. His stylised figures often address identity, migration, memory, religion, and social structures. In Solstride (2025), featured in the exhibition, these references are translated into bold forms and luminous colour. The art piece demonstrates how cultural memory can become a source for constructing new visual identities.
Chinese artist Lu Xinjian approaches perception through the language of the city. Famous for his City DNA series, he converts aerial views of urban environments into precise compositions of lines, geometric forms, and colour. His work The Qasar Al Watan No.2 (2022) continues this process of translating architecture and urban space into an abstract visual code.
Spanish artist Luis Olaso similarly moves between abstraction and the traces of the visible world. His Composition for a table with a bottle and flowers (2025) combines oil, acrylic, oil bar, and oil pastel in a layered process that alternates between spontaneous mark-making and considered reflection. Olaso describes his paintings as self-portraits of emotional and subconscious states, in which colour and form communicate experiences that cannot necessarily be articulated through conventional representation.
Japanese artist Masayoshi Nojo brings another relationship with materiality to the exhibition. His practice combines elements of Japanese aesthetic traditions with unconventional surfaces, including oxidised silver foil. His Mirage artworks explore impermanence, memory, and the passage of time, with changing metallic surfaces reinforcing the idea that what we see is never entirely fixed.
For British painter Phoebe Leech, perception is connected to the body and the construction of identity. Her oil paintings examine masculinity, innocence, growth, and emotional visibility, treating the body as both subject and metaphor. Works such as For Who, I Wonder? (2026) use instinctive, layered brushwork to create an intimate yet somewhat distanced encounter with the figure.
The role of language becomes especially apparent in British artist Robert Montgomery‘s work, which includes billboard poems, light pieces, paintings, woodcuts, and “fire poems”. He brings the conventions of public signage and advertising into poetry, often employing text to create contemplative encounters in public space. Montgomery’s art piece WHENEVER YOU SEE THE SUN (2014/2026) continues his interest in love, memory, hope, and ecology; it demonstrates how words themselves can alter the way an environment is experienced.
American artist Shane Guffogg investigates what lies beyond direct visibility. His abstract paintings explore light, consciousness, and unseen forces, inspired by art history, spirituality, and scientific thought. The layered surfaces of his works, presented in Points of View, create an almost atmospheric experience in which colour and luminosity become vehicles for considering perception itself.
Colombian artist Santiago Parra contributes an especially pared-back form of abstraction. His works are stripped down to expressive black marks against unprimed grounds. Parra’s literary background informs the calligraphic quality of his painting, while his working method deliberately preserves the spontaneity of the brushstroke.
The show also features Vietnamese-born figurative artist Sophie-Yen Bretez, who explores memory and interior experience. Bretez has developed what she calls a dramaturgy of passage; she employs shaped canvases and symbolic objects to examine thresholds, temporal layers, and remembered experiences. Her paintings are often accompanied by poetic texts written before the work itself, with those poems informing the titles and adding another narrative layer.
Canadian artist Tim Kent‘s works blend architectural perspective with fragmented imagery and references to art history, constructing spaces that seem simultaneously recognisable and invented. His Runaway! (2025) reflects his broader interest in power, transformation, and the relationship between past and present. Romanian artist Ur Kasin, meanwhile, works across digital collage, sculpture, and painting, bringing together ordinary motifs with more spectacular or surreal imagery. His compositions reflect the mixture of intimacy, excess, and alienation characteristic of contemporary hyper-digital life.
The artworks in Points of View demonstrate that perspective is not simply a question of where one stands. It can be determined by memory, cultural inheritance, bodily experience, material, language or even the technological conditions through which images are produced and encountered. By placing the diverse approaches alongside one another, JD Malat Gallery turns the act of viewing into an open-ended exchange. The exhibition leaves room for interpretation, allowing the visitors’ experiences to become part of the process.
To learn more about Points of View, please visit the exhibition’s official web page.
You might also be interested in exploring Summer Vibes and Same Air.
