Booth C14, Arena Hall 1
Art Fair Dates
Thursday 14 May – Sunday 17 May 2026
Address: Madinat Jumeirah, Jumeirah Beach Road, Al Sufouh 1, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to announce its participation in Art Dubai 2026 with a solo presentation featuring new works by artist Roudhah Al Mazrouei (b. 2003, Al Ain, UAE).
Award-winning Emirati-born artist and researcher Roudhah Al Mazrouei (b. 2003, Al Ain, UAE) pursues a multidisciplinary practise, encompassing painting, public art, film, sculpture, and printmaking.
Having studied in Abu Dhabi and London, and based in Abu Dhabi, Al Mazrouei’s presentation with Taymour Grahne Projects at Art Dubai 2026, brings a series of new landscapes, works emerging deep from the heart of her practice. In each of these paintings, the artist reflects upon the dramatic landscape of the Northern Emirates, that wild, rugged terrain of her childhood where she recalls many happy days playing amidst the palm trees and farmlands.
A huge part of the artist’s childhood was spent in the mountains and valleys of the northern Emirates, in a small village called Siji. Al Mazrouei says: ‘My family has a farm there, and so many of my paintings draw from that place. They’re love letters, really, to those landscapes.’
Emerging from this environment are these stories, from a never-ending past - works in which Al Mazrouei shapes her deepest memories and emotions. They also echo with innovation, capturing the latest evolutions in this prolific artist’s ever-evolving practise. Al Mazrouei’s painterly language constantly explores new means of expression through technique, form and composition as she pursues her vision, a trait that has borne her aloft from the deliberate realism of earlier years towards the expressive, instinctive mode of image-making she has made her own.
‘A lot of my work has begun by looking into my environment,’ Al Mazrouei explains. ‘The scenes that I paint are scenes that I live in.’ But these works are more than simple representation. They are imbued with deeply personal recollection and impressionistic interpretation.
Initially trained in oil painting, with a focus on portraiture and technical precision, Al Mazrouei’s practice took flight when she pivoted towards a freer, more intuitive reaction to her surroundings. In doing so, she unlocked a subconsciously driven motivation.
She explains: ‘I began with realistic paintings of these landscapes, but when I stopped enjoying the process, I pushed myself out of that comfort zone. I let myself have fun with painting again, and the moment I shifted focus to capturing light and values rather than replicating every detail, this style started to emerge naturally.’
The resulting works are characterised by their vibrancy and immediacy. Al Mazrouei works primarily with oil sticks, drawing directly onto primed canvases. ‘Usually, all my canvases start off with a pure ochre ground,’ she explains. This visible ground not only enriches the depth and richness of her compositions, but in most cases, becomes an active component of the final work, surfacing intermittently between layers of colour. While ochre remains a favoured constant, Al Mazrouei also experiments with other grounds inspired by Al Ain’s earthy terrain and big desert skies, reds, pinks and blues introducing subtle shifts in tonality across the series.
In explaining her typical process, the artist likens it to another deeply held passion. ‘When I cook, I don’t really follow a recipe, as such. But I’ll add my spices, my greens, I’ll taste the meal as it goes… that’s how I paint too. I’ll have my oil sticks, my paint, whatever comes out comes out’. In this way, Al Mazrouei is actively engaging with her media as she works. Rather than pursuing a predefined representation, she is constantly in lively dialogue with her canvas, reacting to previous gestures and marks, balancing values and flavours as the work takes shape, the developing landscape documenting a conversation between an artist and her materials.
With the paintings at Art Dubai, Al Mazrouei takes us deep into her homeland and shares its stories. Some of the works depict scenes from a small village, Siji, where ‘waterfalls, valleys, frogs, truffles’ abound. Marble is mined from the mountains. And the lush, verdant territory thrives, to a historic infrastructure which brought life and growth to the region.
Red Mountain captures Al Mazrouei’s engagement with rugged terrains, rendered here with deep, saturated reds, topped off with a foamy sky, in her signature shade of blue. ‘This one was a huge canvas, which I primed with a reddish-pinkish colour. I then did a simple charcoal sketch, laying out how I want my mountain peaks to look, where I want the water in the valley to be. Then I started with the colours. I start with the sky, so the blue that you see on top is the sky. You work around the line, you build, you add more elements, and it reaches a natural conclusion’.
Her sky’s vivid blue presence, crowning the peaks and trickling down into spidery tributaries, is a constant across the artist’s landscapes. This blue is an ‘accent colour’, functioning neatly both as a unifying element and a compositional intervention. Often applied at the final stage of a composition, Al Mazrouei uses the blue to resolve areas of tension within the painting.
In Gates, Al Mazrouei turns to the thresholds of rural space. ‘This is how a gate to a farm would look like in the Northern Emirates,’ she says. While specific in origin, the image resonates more broadly as a recurring architectural form. Notably, the work also allows Al Mazrouei to embrace her expressiveness, bringing joyful sweeps of blue around the lines and structures, adding an additional jolt of emotional electricity to the final work.
This piece also introduces halo-like forms around the palm trees, an element drawn from the artist’s formative years, learning her craft by copying figurative studies. ‘When I was younger, I trained in recreating portraits of Mother Mary, religious paintings, and they’d always have a halo around her head. So, I guess this stayed with me! Putting the halo on a palm tree for me was just signifying how sacred and divine a palm tree is to local culture’. The gesture elevates the everyday palm tree into a sacred symbol, without departing from the directness of her visual language.
Al Mazrouei’s presentation at Art Dubai also includes smaller, canvas-board works. In these pieces, not only does the constrained scale impose a different set of conditions for the artist to navigate, but they also recall the ancient art of miniature painting so prevalent in the Middle East and South Asia, a form that the artist has experimented with extensively in the past. ‘When you work with a smaller piece, you’re challenged as an artist,’ she explains. ‘You want to be able to show what something is, without the space.’
These limitations inspire ingenious workarounds, harder contrasts, concentrated compositional focus and a spare, distilled palette. ‘You’re restricted in what you can show, so I go from extreme shade to extreme light pretty fast. That’s how the image reveals itself to you’ Al Mazrouei says. These works resound with detail, dramatic intent, while maintaining the spontaneity of her larger canvases.
Here, Al Mazrouei examines surface and texture more closely, revealing a delicious interplay between hard densities, grainy, multicoloured earth and flowing water. These compositions operate at a more intimate scale yet remain connected to the broader themes of landscape and memory that define her practice.
Underlying this group of paintings, driving the emotional impact and simmering tension is Al Mazrouei’s sustained interest in the fragility of memory, particularly as it relates to oral histories. ‘These are all dependent on fleeting words that are spoken,’ she reflects, ‘Because when a person goes away, their history goes away too, really.’ This sense of impermanence adds a poignant dimension. These are paintings that resist fixity, built through layers that reveal as much as they conceal.
While her work resonates with viewers who know similar environments to her own, Al Mazrouei enjoys the universality of the stories she tells in her landscapes, which are at once specific to her background and yet relatable and emotionally resonant to all. This is, in part, due to the intensely personal nature of the work.
In this group of paintings on view at Art Dubai 2026, Taymour Grahne Projects offers a concise yet expansive view of Roudhah Al Mazrouei’s practice, one defined by instinct, material exploration, and an ongoing dialogue between place and memory.
Roudhah Al Mazrouei (b. 2003, Al Ain, UAE) is an Abu Dhabi-based visual artist and researcher. She has contributed to significant projects including receiving the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Award in 2022, and creating interactive sculptural installations across the UAE for the Sikka Festival in 2024 and 2025 and Sharjah Islamic Festival in 2025. Her work reflects a dedication to crafting public art that is both conceptually rigorous and culturally resonant. Beyond her artistic practice, Roudhah is committed to education and research. She has been actively involved in developing educational initiatives, including her contributions to 421 and the UAE pavilion in Osaka 2025’s public programming and the Arts Proxy Program at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is currently a Kawader Research Fellow at Al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, where she conducts archival research on the development of art education in the UAE from the 1960s onward. Roudhah holds a BA in Art & Art History from New York University Abu Dhabi and an MFA from the Royal College of Art.