Hayfa Al Gwaiz, a Saudi-based artist and architect, was a natural choice for AD’s second cover for the April/May Art Issue. Her work is an intriguing mix of painting and architectural thinking, expert at turning slow, ordinary scenes into artistic, social and political statements.
Hayfa Al Gwaiz’s work feels therapeutic. The Saudi-based painter and architect has caught the attention of audiences at home and abroad with her realistic depictions of people and spaces across Saudi Arabia and beyond. Within the stoic compositions of her paintings and installations, there is a quiet space carved out for the viewer, accommodating both the insider and the outsider, politely offering a vantage point that feels both comfortable and conscious.
Hayfa Al Gwaiz’s work offers unflinching insights into her own life, and in so doing, achieves that rare quality of creating introspection within the viewer, too. Amongst the frictionless aesthetics of the digital age, her output is reassuringly tactile and visceral. Her thoughtful explorations of the liminal feel like a balm against the cynical edges of our binary world.
The acrylic-on-linen artwork is drawn from a familiar scene of her parents sharing breakfast at home. Set within interiors rooted in the visual language of home life in the Gulf, with rose-toned seating and patterned carpets, the composition is rendered with the intimacy of a miniature and the clarity of an axonometric view.
When at home in Riyadh, the artist works from a studio in her family residence, combining technical precision (which comes naturally following years in architecture) with a flair for storytelling. “Because my practice came from looking at the 3D world, I’m very interested in the flattening of that world, and how one can contain so many different multitudes within that flatness,” she says of her detail-oriented works. “Physically, I’m very technical with my work; I use lasers and rulers. I look at it as a floor plan or an elevation drawing.”
As such, Al Gwaiz’s work maps an exciting new visual culture for the Gulf, which exists effortlessly on its own terms, excavating moments of the ordinary and questioning previously perceived divides between the domestic and public world. Her thoughtful approach to the dichotomies concerning private and public, subject and object, presence and absence is what lends her art its subtle yet subversive air.
“I like my work to disrupt binaries,” Al Gwaiz explains. “I like to bring the public into my space, but with intention.” Her paintings centred around the abaya are perhaps the most powerful embodiments of the artistic reticence that characterises her work, achieved without compromising on emotion or meaning. These works often depict the abaya as a second skin, devoid of human figure or form, and usually set within a domestic environment.
The artist’s interpretations draw on references to the abject, yet do so with a disarmingly affectionate tone, one that mirrors her own feelings toward a garment burdened with accumulated political and cultural meaning. “I love the abaya,” Al Gwaiz says, referencing it as a rite of passage for young Saudi women. Of What Lies Beneath, a work which portrays the luminous folds of a removed abaya juxtaposed against a muted domestic backdrop, she says: “I wanted to play with the tension between the context of the object and the object itself - the way in which the object is redacting the woman’s body, and so I redact the room to give her privacy.”
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In the case of Hayfa Al Gwaiz, her controlled and purposeful opening of this private space is a welcoming reminder of her artistic agency, and of a cultural legacy which she neither acknowledges nor ignores, yet forges her own path within. In these private domestic spheres, rather than entertaining the orientalist gaze, we see the mundane. Rather than an objectified body, we see an object that carries the tenderness of human presence. Instead of an eroticised external narrative, we get a sober, internal one. As a result, the artist’s radical insistence on depicting the everyday in this wider context becomes marvellously political.
When asked what influences her work, Al Gwaiz answers in that same powerfully unassuming form that encapsulates her canvases. “I’m inspired by things that are not grand, narratives that aren’t heroic and by everyday things that are happening in life. [Because] what occurs today informs tomorrow.”
As competing external forces continue struggling to define the Gulf region, often evoking that same grandness, it’s reassuring to know that narratives at home are in the hands of artists with such astute and grounding insights.
