Zawyeh Gallery Dubai presents The Promise, a solo exhibition by internationally famous Palestinian artist Bashir Makhoul, running through 30 June 2025. The show brings together his latest paintings, sculptures, and textile works, continuing his exploration of abstraction, cultural hybridity, and themes of home, displacement, and identity.
The title, The Promise, evokes an ambiguous statement, suggesting both a declaration and a transformation. It implies hope as well as the potential for betrayal. This tension lies at the heart of Makhoul’s practice, where creation and fragmentation, unity and rupture coexist in powerful dialogue.
The exhibition focuses on Makhoul’s enduring motif: the house depicted as a cube with a door and window. These minimal structures, repeated in dense and chaotic arrangements, allude to the overcrowding of refugee camps and the precarity of marginalised spaces. The vibrant colour palettes offer a visual elegance that contrasts sharply with the unsettling realities they reflect.
Among the works on display is, for example, Fractured Oblivion, a series of paintings that builds on Makhoul’s earlier Promise series. Here, scattered blossom petals, once symbolising unity, now encircle dark voids, evoking bullet holes the artist documented in Beirut during the 1990s. Also on view is Deep Wounds, a series of carved wooden sculptures that disrupt the illusion of wholeness with chiselled voids, and Skein, a collection of art pieces where thread becomes a metaphor for exile, return, and the fragility of belonging.
About the artist
Bashir Makhoul (b. 1963, Palestine) is an artist, art historian, and lecturer. He obtained a BFA (Hons.) from Liverpool Polytechnic (UK, 1990), an MFA (1992), and a Ph.D. in theory and practice of art (1995) from Manchester Metropolitan University (UK). Makhoul has held senior academic roles in the UK, including Vice-Chancellor at the University for the Creative Arts in 2017. He currently serves as President of the University Canada West in Vancouver.
Makhoul’s practice often delves into conflict, displacement, and memory. From early abstract works incorporating Palestinian flag colours during the First Intifada to large-scale installations using everyday materials like cardboard or ceramic houses, he examines the symbolism of home, borders, and resistance. His signature use of lenticular printing merges past and present imagery, layering historical photographs with contemporary ones.
Makhoul has showcased his works in multiple exhibitions across the globe, including The Little Prince of Gaza (Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF), Beirut, Lebanon, 2023); La Palestine à L’IMA (Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France, 2016); the Asia Triennial Manchester 14 (UK, 2014); the 55th Venice Biennale (Italy, 2013); and Return in Conflict (solo) (Shenzhen Art Museum, China, 2008), among others. In 2020, Makhoul received a Special Recognition Award for his outstanding leadership in the arts from the British Education Awards (UK).
For more information about The Promise, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you may be interested in visiting Supernatural·Algorithm by Zhou Song and Sharjah Biennial 16.
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