NAHLA AL SHAIKH

Short Biography

Nahla grew up in Amman in a household where creativity was constant, surrounded by literature, embroidery, painting, music, and architecture. She completed a degree in Fine Arts in 2012 and participated in solo and group exhibitions in Amman before building a professional career in wealth management, maintaining her artistic practice alongside it. After relocating to the UAE, her visual language expanded through the country's shifting light, layered architecture, and cultural intersections. She is currently developing two connected bodies of work: 'Bearing Witness', developed in response to Gaza, and 'Nostalgia', which approaches memory through color, gesture, and layered surface rather than literal description.

Education

Nahla holds a degree in Fine Arts, completed in 2012.

Exhibitions

Nahla has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Amman, Jordan.

Artistic Style

Nahla's practice is expressionist in orientation, guided more by feeling than by representation. She works primarily in acrylic and oil pastel, building surfaces through layering, scraping, drawing, and reconstruction until each piece carries the emotional weight she is seeking. Her palette shifts across works, from dense earthy browns and burnt oranges to washed blues, chalky whites, and bruised violet tones, closer in quality to worn fabric or a stained wall than to any fixed color scheme. Her pencil drawing practice runs in parallel as a quieter counterpart to the painted work, where graphite accumulates slowly until a form surfaces. 'Bearing Witness' deals with repetition, mediated images, and human presence at a distance, developed in response to Gaza. 'Nostalgia' translates how a period of life returns emotionally, sometimes as no more than a color or the warmth of a remembered room. She is currently expanding 'Nostalgia' onto canvases of two to three m, so the gesture becomes more physical and the paintings begin to surround the viewer rather than simply face them.