Almaha Jaralla Emirati , b. 1996

Almaha Jaralla is an Emirati painter whose work centres on the lived textures of the Gulf and the inherited legacies that structure that life, including ancestral ties to Aden. Working predominantly in pigment on textile, she treats fabric as a material that holds the intimacy of the domestic as well as the trace of human movement across time and lineage. Her compositions restage habitual scenes and gestures from ordinary life in the region, distilling them into archetypal relations. Faces and details recede so that posture, adjacency, colour and ground become the carriers of meaning.

Jaralla’s paintings stage human motion at a small scale - pauses at roadside, collective rest, provisional gatherings - to register broader questions of belonging, settlement and social formation. Colour palettes echo the tonal drift of aged photographs, allowing temporality to surface as atmosphere rather than narrative. By compressing personal memory into simplified pictorial structures, her work shows how history persists in everyday arrangements of bodies, materials and space.

Jaralla’s work is held in public and private collections internationally, including the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE.

EDUCATION 

MFA, NYU Abu Dhabi, UAE