Safeya Sharif Al Awadhi UAE, b. 1999
Overview
Safeya Sharif’s practice unfolds through a surreal geometry. Forms that feel dreamt before they are built. Her work inhabits a hallucinatory space between structure and illusion, where lucid-dream logic shapes visual systems that appear architectural. Through large-scale sculptures and spatial interventions, she constructs suspended frames that act as portals that distort perspective and function. Sharif’s language of repetition and physical interruption evokes a hyperreality. Familiar motifs such as windows, doors, and corridors are abstracted into floating symbols of presence, absence, and the instability of space.
Works
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Folding Painting 05, 2026 -
Folding Painting 06, 2026
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Holding the Dunes III — Shifting, 2026
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Holding the Dunes I — Gathering, 2026
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Lines of Persistence, 2026
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I think about leaving but i stay 2024 05, 2024
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Forwarding Threads, 2025
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Moving Trails, 2025
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Unfolding and Nonfunctional, 2025
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Folding Painting , 2025
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Folding Painting 02, 2025
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Folding Painting 03, 2025
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Untitled, 2024
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Eight Door, 2025
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One Door, 2025
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Three Doors, 2025
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Threads and Doors Without a Room, 2024
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Threads and Doors Without a Room, 2024
Biography
Safeya Sharif’s practice moves fluidly across different mediums shaped by lucid dreaming and architectural memory. Her work operates at the threshold between perception and illusion, where space folds, flattens, and fractures into hallucinatory geometries. Sharif’s work often incorporates framed voids that act as floating symbols that resist fixed orientation or function.
Material plays a central role in her investigation of form. In her sculptural interventions, frames are reconfigured as visual interruptions. Through her paintings, she creates a subjective experience as well as invoking the language of modernist abstraction while undoing its logic. Whereas her works on paper extend this sensibility into quieter registers.
Sharif’s spatial constructions are not anchored by narrative, but by a continuous process of unfolding— where form is in flux and meaning is provisional. She invites viewers into a suspended environment where geometry becomes atmospheric, and where the familiar is reoriented into something more speculative. Her practice is a sustained inquiry into the instability of space and the soft architecture of interior perception.
Her recent group shows include Unstable Grounds, MFA Thesis Exhibition at Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi (2025); Abu Dhabi Art Fair, Abu Dhabi (2024); Pressure Points at the Project Space, New York University Abu Dhabi (2024); Sikka Art and Design Festival, Al Shindagha, Dubai (2024); Time and Identity at Al Safa Art and Design Library, Dubai (2023); and Press Print at Aisha Al Abbar Gallery (2023).
Her work has also featured in Chill Summer in the City at Aisha Al Abbar Gallery in collaboration with IRIS Advisory (2022); Flight into Innovation at Festival City (2022); Psychedelic Surrealism at Quoz Art Festival (2022); and Shagaf Annual Printmaking Exhibition at Dubai Design District (2022).
Earlier exhibitions include Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Rochester, NY (2021); The Emerald Print Exchange at Karin Clarke Gallery, Eugene, USA (2021); College of Arts and Creative Enterprises (CACE) Senior Exhibition, Dubai Design District (2021); and Looking Elsewhere at Zayed University Urban Satellite Space at the Foundry, Dubai (2020).
Safeya Sharif Al Awadhi lives and works in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Safeya Sharif Al Awadhi lives and works in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.