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DUBAI: Los Angeles-based painter Sarah Awad was born to a Lebanese-Syrian father and a Lebanese mother. However, despite her Levantine-Arab roots, she made her first trip to the Middle East in November to install her show at The Third Line, “Rainbow Clearances and Other Paintings” in Dubai, which will be on display on two floors of the gallery until December. Will capture 16.

“What really impressed me about Dubai was the international community and how vibrant and diverse it is,” Awad told Arab News. “People are really hospitable, warm and engaged. They come and they participate. It feels small, because everyone knows each other and supports each other.”

Awadh has been interested in art since childhood. “Art education isn’t great in the States and my family isn’t artists, but my mom always exposed me to creative projects,” she says. “For some reason, when I was a kid, I knew I was going to be a painter.

“I don’t think I could imagine doing anything else. I find that painting is both a joy and a gift, and also a source of stress, because there is always a feeling of not being satisfied or feeling like There are still some questions and some unresolved,” she continues. “I think what’s exciting to me about painting is that sense of the unknown. To make a great painting, you have to have the experience of not knowing.”

The works in the exhibition showcase Awadh’s practice of mixing and matching shapes, colors and faces together. The form is free-flowing and bold, marked with thick, fearless brushstrokes. The use of color – she is not afraid of equalizing light and dark – is a constant theme in her work. “A great starting point for me is thinking about palettes and color relationships. Sometimes, it just doesn’t work,” she laughs.

“I’m really interested in a color that doesn’t feel like it should work but does,” she continues. “It’s about how they work in relation to each other. In most works, you’ll actually see a vibrant, saturated color that’s offset by a more neutral color, or a color that comes through in other colors.” , Carves out its own niche. I like to have a surprising moment in painting.

While the paintings contain elements of abstraction and figurativeness, Awad refuses to label his style. “I don’t have a categorization for it. I think it positions itself along some of the lines of questions that painters historically had about abstraction,” she says.

“They are not process-based paintings, but at the same time, they use intuition and language that stems from (abstract expressionist) Helen Frankenthaler or Willem de Kooning – this way of responding to materiality and then a conscious composition To impose works. It’s not just about physical improvement or accident, it’s also about intent,” Awad continues.

Sometimes it seems that there may be hidden figures in a piece from Awadh. Some are in intimate conversation, while another is looking directly at the viewer or is lost in thought. It seems that every picture has a story of its own.

“I think of them as open-ended. The way I think about their position in a painting is often a gesture,” Awad says. “They are gestures of intimacy, but also of looking – the act of looking. I think there is a way in which they ask you to engage with them and with the painting.

In recent years, the contemporary art scene has changed, with large installations and on-site projects that are more likely to be picked up by social media becoming increasingly popular. There is something humbling in Awad’s back-to-basics approach to staging his work, allowing viewers to directly contemplate the images and appreciate the art of painting once again.

“I didn’t find the need to do other things,” says Awad. “I find painting as a discipline so challenging and so rich that you can live inside that box for your whole life and still never discover the edges of it. I think in today’s world it is a The reason for the kind of chaos is that it takes time, and I don’t know if the younger generations are adapted to it.