Coming up at XVA Gallery – The Truth, by Hussein Al Mohasen
Join us from January 10th to February 05th, 2026 to explore how visual art can reveal truth, inspire hope, and connect people through colour, poetry, and expressive techniques.
Vernissage on January 10th from 3 to 6pm. See you at XVA!
I believe that visual art is an important medium to make people see and perceive the truth. I tried to express my thoughts and feelings of peace and the love of humanity in a different colourful perspective of seeing things.
A piece of visual arts plays a big role in our lives, sometimes looking at a cover magazine and its title inspires the artist where he starts constructing images in his mind and just goes along with living this experience; reaching an area where he needs to visually communicate.
With my new body of work I am trying to reach what is beyond reality, to go where I want the viewers to experience a visual journey, which makes them see reality in a hopeful, peaceful, manner; even if reality, sometimes, is not as desirable as we want!
Colour and poetry are very important in my work, where the different connotations associated with certain poetry, text in different languages and colours beautify what I am trying to convey through art. I personally find graffiti very inspiring. Seeing the impact it leaves on people from all around the world, a huge impact is obtained with only a few words being sprayed onto walls. I find the physicality of creating this type of art is highly liberating, as well as the spectrum of colours I set into my palette.
Bio
Visual artist Hussein Al Mohasen (Qatif, Saudi Arabia, 1971) has been active in the art world in the Gulf region since his first appearance in 1999 at the Al-Janadriya Festival in his native Saudi Arabia, where he has since then occupied a place alongside the pioneering Saudi artists. Al Mohasen’s work, characterized by a singular dialogue between the audience and the artist, conceives of images and visual environs as a series of surgical incisions, cutting open the theater of horror and comedy, called the Middle East, into frozen frames. But these images are never static; Al Mohasen’s sharp-colored stenciled images translate into continuous and extended narratives of experiences that not only describe the world, but actively participate in it.
In his most recent body of work, the Saudi artist has moved away from abstract surfaces into symbolic and iconographic imageries, reflecting now the endless transitions of the contemporary between digital and real, political and social, private and public and the continuous transformation of the Gulf region, alternating a liquid modernity with solid traditions and histories. Unlike other artists in the Middle East experimenting with graffiti, Al Mohasen understands the acute sense of irony with which pop art was riddled since the outset, and has incorporated his humorous reflections into the altogether tragic narratives of Arab history. His work is both conceptual and liberating, drawing on art from the public space, but executed here with the fine precision of a cartographer.
Behind the obvious simplicity of his works, lurks a decades-long journey shaped by poetry from the Arab world and the complex intersections between modern spaces and personal freedoms. Al Mohasen’s work is visually global and overcomes regional paradigms, presenting the contemporary Arab experience after the fashion of the poetry and music that inspired him: In the end, we all speak the same language. Hussein Al Mohasen’s work has been exhibited all over the Middle East since 1999. His most recent solo and group exhibitions have been held in Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
