Nasser Almulhim
Echoes of a Dreamscape, 2025Acrylic on canvas
180 x 180 cm
70 7/8 x 70 7/8 in
Nasser Almulhim KSA, b. 1988
70 7/8 x 70 7/8 in
Exhibitions
High Spirits signals a new chapter in Nasser Almulhim’s exploration of abstraction, where colour, geometry, spirituality, and psychology converge in painting and space. The exhibition features a new body of vibrant works—five paintings, a sculpture, and a large-scale site-specific installation—at ICD Brookfield Place that expands Almulhim’s therapeutic approach to artmaking into the public realm, disrupting the everyday through playful sensory engagement.Cut-outs derived from Almulhim’s painted geometries rise from the ground and unfold across the building’s atrium, transforming the site into a field of colour and movement. Alongside them, large-scale works on canvas connect the audience to the artist's psychological sphere. Curves, archways, and vessel-like forms emerge through rippling lines that seem to vibrate across the surface, creating a frequency that lifts the viewer’s gaze and spirit. This visual language extends into three dimensions; the installation invites the audience to step inside the chromatic and psychological terrain that has long defined Almulhim’s practice, translating his introspective language of tone and form into a shared spatial experience. Through this expansion, he turns architectural space into a site of connection, contemplation, and joy, reimagining typical encounters with the workplace.
Conceived as an offering of energy and optimism, High Spirits invites curiosity and play within the urban environment. Almulhim channels abstraction as a form of healing and emotional investigation, as colour becomes energy and geometry a map of the inner self. Through this body of work, he reminds us to reawaken our sense of wonder, to embrace play, joy, and colour as essential elements of existence.
Literature
High Spirits marks a pivotal moment in Nasser Almulhim’s artistic journey, expanding his exploration of abstraction into new material and emotional dimensions. Comprising a series of paintings, a sculptural work, and an installation, the exhibition continues the artist’s long-standing dialogue with geometry, colour, and spiritual consciousness while introducing a heightened attention to scale and spatial vibration through the installation. The works on view exist between structure and surrender, embodying what Almulhim describes as “the constant movement between chaos and clarity.”
High Spirits is energy made visible. The artist questions how colour might stir the unconscious, how geometry can chart inner terrain, and how abstraction can act as a passage toward transcendence. While his earlier works revealed meditative fields of pigment, gestures layered to expose depth beneath surface, this new body of work brings that meditative energy into physical space. The accompanying installation and sculpture extends painting into the realm of experience, inviting viewers to enter the chromatic world his canvases evoke.
Born in Riyadh in 1988, Almulhim studied studio art in Florida before returning to Saudi Arabia, where he has become part of a growing generation of artists shaping the region’s contemporary abstraction. His formative years in the United States exposed him to post-war American abstraction and theories of colour-field painting, yet his practice remains firmly grounded in regional legacy. The geometry of desert architecture, the rhythmic logic of Islamic ornamentation, and the chromatic intensity of local light all inform his compositions. Through them, Almulhim proposes a visual language that mediates between geographies, between modernist formalism and Sufi metaphysics.
Central to his process is the belief that painting is a form of therapy, a spiritual practice of release and renewal. “Every canvas,” he notes, “is a mirror and a meditation. It begins in emotion and ends in reflection.” This psychological depth becomes more pronounced in High Spirits, where the artist returns to Jungian theory and the practice of shadow work to investigate what lies beneath surface perception. The resulting compositions, saturated fields of cobalt, vermilion, and verdant green giving way to midnight blue, ochre, and near-white accents, suggest a tension between revelation and concealment.
In both the paintings and the three-dimensional works, colour holds the potential for transformation. Gestures coalesce into geometric order or dissolve into organic silhouettes. Figures are hinted at but never realised, leaving the works suspended in a state of becoming - open, alive, and charged with the viewer’s own reading.