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Colour drenching is one of the season's most talked-about aesthetics. As we move away from neutral indifference, we land on a home in Abu Dhabi that takes character to a whole new level.
Art for collectors Hayfa Matar and Tariq Baloch has never been about decoration, status or trends. Instead, it is about paying attention to the world, to forgotten voices, and to the emotions that objects carry when they are allowed to live fully in a space. Since moving to Abu Dhabi (they have previously lived in London and New York), the couple has crafted a home that is comfortable in its own skin. The walls are painted proudly in vibrant hues, colour drenching each room; spaces are adorned with furniture by various radical designers of the 1970s, and dotted with works by outsider artists. Theirs is less a collection of pieces and more a conversation across decades, disciplines, and personal histories.
Matar, a former diplomat turned cultural and policy consultant, describes art as a kind of barometer. “We follow the arts closely out of interest. They capture where the world is today,” she says, recalling regular visits to the Venice Biennale in the early 2000s, which she experienced as a “snapshot of the world”. For her, art must reflect the times, its anxieties, its energy, its contradictions. That belief underpins much of what she and Baloch have chosen to live with.
Baloch, a lawyer, speaks about their collection as deliberately mixed, but not random. “There are underlying threads,” he explains. Those threads include outsider artists, self-taught makers, forgotten figures and, most importantly, women artists who were historically sidelined. On the design side, there is a gravitational pull towards the Italian Radical movement of the 1970s, Memphis, of course, but also designers like Dan Friedman, whose work and philosophy resonate deeply with them. “We were a bit inspired by Friedman’s house, which had crazy colours, so we just painted ours all over,” says Baloch on the home's spectacular use of colour drenching. “Sometimes you doubt the colours and think, ‘maybe we should have gone for a different shade’, but that’s the point. It’s a constant conversion. You can change it, or you can live with it.”
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One artist they return to often is Mimi Gross, who emerged from the New York art scene of the 1960s, a period usually told through a narrow canon of male names. “It wasn’t just the Pollocks and the Judds,” Baloch notes. “There were women, too, but they were often forgotten.” Gross, who was married to artist Red Grooms and is the daughter of a well-known sculptor, worked consistently for decades. The couple met her in New York, became friends, and acquired work directly from her studio. “She is someone who should be far more well-known,” Baloch says simply.
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That instinct, to look beyond the dominant narrative, also drew the couple to outsider art. Their awareness of figures like Thornton Dial, whose assemblage works are now held by major museums, emerged from research into African-American creative expressions beyond music. Baloch references the late writer Bill Arnett, who argued that while jazz was celebrated, visual art created by the same communities was largely ignored. Discovering it required going into people’s homes and seeing what was made outside institutional validation. “That's a lot of what's in the house,” Baloch says.
The same ethos extends to design. Dan Friedman, who began his career as a graphic designer, ultimately rejected what he saw as the emptiness of creating “fictional representations” for corporations. Leaving behind commercial success, he began making furniture, or “domestic sculpture”, as he called it, using found objects, and guided by a set of principles he later taught at Yale. Matar and Baloch own one of his major (now museum-worthy) works, Orangeade, a folding screen made with painted MDF, feathers and soda cans, which he made for the renowned American pop artist Keith Haring, who was his friend and collaborator.
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The couple purchased it directly from the artist’s brother, tracking down original 1980s soda cans on eBay to restore it accurately. Provenance matters deeply to them, not as bragging rights, but as a form of stewardship. This sense of responsibility runs throughout the house. Original Memphis pieces sit alongside later works inspired by the Italian design movement, including furniture by avant-garde group Studio Alchimia. Italian Radical design, born in the 1970s as a rejection of convention and polite Modernism, finds a natural home here. “Memphis was a reaction to conventional furniture,” Baloch says. “It was cheaply made, but it was sort of jarring, and it brought people together.” For Matar, the colour drenching appeal is simple: “It’s fun, it’s colourful. It’s functional art.”
Living with art is not a metaphor in this house. This is a place where children climb on Nicola L.’s sculptural furniture, and friends can sit, lean and sprawl on Vladimir Kagan’s Omnibus sofa. “We’re not precious about these things,” Matar says. Baloch laughs about guests who panic when they see children interacting with museum-worthy pieces. “The funny thing is, the more you let them run around, the less they push or scratch. And the people who made these things wanted that. They didn’t want them to be guarded.”
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Much like the furniture and artworks they live with, the couple’s philosophy resists trends. “We never want to be part of a community that forgets people,” says Baloch. In a world where artists can be celebrated at a biennale and disappear a decade later, they choose to follow what moves them emotionally. Whether that means conceptual artworks or that of emerging artists, they want to remain open: the kind of people who, had they lived in the 1960s, would not have dismissed what seemed strange or shocking. This openness extends beyond aesthetics. Here, colour, radical forms and unconventional beauty become a form of quiet resistance to rigid ideas of success and 'good taste'. For the couple’s children, the house carries that message. “We just want them to feel free,” Matar says, “to not feel like they have to conform.”
Ultimately, this collection is not about coherence. “We didn’t bring things together thinking ‘this colour goes with that’,” Baloch says. “We just bought what we liked, from independent-minded people.” The result is a home that starts conversations and provokes reactions, sometimes confusion, sometimes delight, but never indifference. And that, perhaps, is the point. As one of Dan Friedman’s commandments urges: be radical. Not just in art or design, but in how one chooses to live.
Also Read: Colour Drenching: 8 Tips for Going Bold Without Looking Like a Paint Accident
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