Alia Zaal

Alia Zaal’s practice centers on observing and reimagining the natural world as encountered in everyday life. Through painting, she documents native flora discovered during her walks across the urban landscapes of the UAE—quiet, often overlooked plants that persist in the margins of rapidly transforming environments. Her works are intimate acts of attention, capturing the resilience and poetry of local vegetation amidst built surroundings.

Her recent body of work reflects a deepened sensitivity to light and movement, shaped by her residency at Claude Monet’s former home in Giverny, France. Immersed in the study of impressionistic brushwork, Zaal embraced techniques that foreground sensation over precision. Softened and blurred strokes lend her compositions a dreamlike quality, evoking the feeling of memory as much as observation.

Blending the immediacy of place with a lyrical sensibility, Zaal’s paintings hover between the real and the imagined. They offer a quiet resistance to erasure—archiving native plants not only as botanical subjects but as symbols of endurance, rootedness, and fragile continuity.