BIO

„True art emerges from the inner struggle between reason and intuition.“
Abdulhamid Abdalla, 2025

Artist Statement

I was born in a small village, and my childhood there became the source of my visual and emotional memory. Every morning, sunlight would fall on the walls of our house, turning them into golden surfaces. The endless wheat fields appeared to me as liquid gold. When my mother washed carpets or clothes and hung them up to dry, she created compositions reminiscent of modern art without realizing it. These everyday images became a silent school of vision for me.

In the evening, we gathered around the elders and listened to their stories about love, war, ghosts, and adventures. I was always curious and would ask each of the older visitors to tell us children a story in the evening. These stories contained elements of fantasy and drama that still characterize my work today. Later, I moved to big cities and experienced formative relationships. Every woman in my life was like a character in a novel with her own chapter. I visited museums and exhibitions. I studied art from ancient cultures to classical and contemporary styles. My curiosity about aesthetic development led me to search for my own visual language combining time, memory, and symbolism.

When I paint, my hearing recedes. I no longer hear anything – everything shifts into the silence between me and the canvas. The first lines emerge intuitively. Body, color and gesture become my language. My paintings reflect memories and fragments of everyday life, as well as personal and collective experiences. I use gold leaf not as decoration, but as a carrier of light, warmth, and quiet depth. The human body is at the center, serving not just as a motif but also as a repository of identity, memory, and inner conflict. I observe how cultural imprints manifest in gestures, posture, and surface.

My paintings combine classical forms with contemporary art. Complex compositions create spaces that exist between intimacy and publicity, memory and projection. I create an open, ambiguous language — spaces of thought that remain open, continually inviting new interpretations. In a time of a permanent flood of images and information, I am looking for a visual language that does not overwhelm but decelerates. A language that rethinks proximity, makes identity tangible – and gives human experience a form that is as contradictory as it is lively.

Biography

Abdulhamid Abdalla is an Armenian-Kurdish artist and was born in a village near Al-Hasakah in Syria. He currently lives and works in Hamburg, Germany. Abdalla discovered art as a form of expression in his childhood, long before he learned the language. It was during this time that he created his first works on clay walls. Later he studied fine arts in Damascus. During his studies, he exhibited his work both nationally and internationally.

Abdalla’s artistic development is characterized by an intercultural perspective. Through his art, he aims to build bridges between the individual and society, and between inside and outside. In his practice, he combines precision craftsmanship with conceptual openness. He explores and rethinks the body, identity, and the current social present.