Ayad Alkadhi: Sunken Republic - - Exhibitions

Dubai, UAE – Leila Heller Gallery is delighted to announce the upcoming solo exhibition, a curated selection of artworks by Ayad Alkadhi titled Sunken Republic opening on 27th January 2026.

Sunken Republic confronts the viewer with raw, tangled scenes that resist neat narratives. Explosions of form and fracture echo the chaos of life shaped by political conflict, social unrest, and the relentless pressure to survive. Figures knot together in states of tension — flesh intertwined with bone, plant matter, and clouds of pigment — balancing corporeal solidity with dissolution. In Sunken Republic, Ayad Alkadhi examines the psychological and physical consequences of living in a world defined by persistent instability. Drawing from lived experience alongside recent global and regional upheavals, the exhibition presents a body of paintings forged through themes of conflict, displacement, and endurance. These forces do not sit at the margins of the work; they form its structural core. Alkadhi brings bodies, landscapes, and fragments of history into collision, constructing scenes that feel at once deliberate and perpetually on the verge of unraveling.

His visual language moves fluidly across art historical and contemporary references — from Renaissance compositional structure to Japanese woodblock aesthetics, alongside the immediacy of street art and comic-book imagery. Precise draftsmanship coexists with drips, neon ruptures, and dissolving edges, creating surfaces that feel both controlled and volatile. Figures twist, fuse, and disperse, hovering between presence and disappearance, as if caught mid-transformation. Across the exhibition, upheaval operates as both subject and condition. The paintings question who holds power, who is erased, and how identity is reshaped under pressure. Bodies become landscapes; landscapes become contested territory. History is not depicted as fixed, but as something fractured, layered, and continually rewritten. Rather than offering resolution, Sunken Republic proposes liberation as unstable and ongoing — something glimpsed in moments of rupture, in unfinished lines, and in forms that refuse to fully settle. The works hold tension without release, inviting viewers to sit within uncertainty and to recognize survival itself as an act of resistance.

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