Ziad Al Najjar

“Ziad Al Najjar is an Emirati artist who currently works and live in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. His interdisciplinary practice ranges from traditional mediums to new media. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for five years with a focus in painting and graduated in 2023. He received a scholarship from the UAE Ministry of Higher Education and a Creative Honors Scholarship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During the same year he gained representation with Tabari Artspace, a modern and contemporary art gallery in Dubai where he had his first solo exhibition in January. Following that he continued to exhibit in group, duo and trio shows in Chicago and Dubai in places such as Sulk Chicago, NYUAD Project space, and ICD Brookfield Place.

Establishing an interplay between organic and inorganic forms Al Najjar infuses his symbolically dense work with icons and influence from the natural world. The artist considers the connectedness between the natural, constructed, and spiritual realms and how they relate to our lived experience in the contemporary moment. The Islamic miniatures made familiar to him during his childhood regularly appear as motifs within his practice. Scenes of battle, the banal and spiritual practices are often poetically depicted in orchards or gardens. Al Najjar summons this world into his art infusing it with his recent experiences of flora, fauna, or soft shapes that resemble cells under a microfine glass. Delicate and sensual organic forms - some representational some abstract - ungulate across the artist’s canvas. Translation and tension - between past and present, structure and wildness - are central to this work.”