Zeinab Saleh: The space {between}

“Presence is subtle and ambiguous in these spaces: Saleh herself is not visible, yet from the richness with which she renders haptic effects of texture, light and scale, we surmise that these are rooms she knows very well.… Such deft handling of materials produces a rich perceptual world, the kind best enjoyed from a place of stillness, where the body feels safe and calm, the senses open to nuance and subtlety.”

—Ellen Mara De Wachter, critic, 2024

“Saleh uses recurring patterns and silhouettes to project layers of time and meaning onto her canvases. She alludes to narratives but rarely are they fully disclosed.”

—Nathan Ladd, Curator, Tate Britain, 2024

“I want there to be lightness and a sense of calm in the paintings. I use quite a muted palette, and try to think about the atmosphere in a painting.”

—Zeinab Saleh, 2024

“I begin to think of Zeinab’s dense, enigma-filled surfaces as emotion-scapes, collisions of time and place, fragments of stories—real and imagined. Alternative landscapes, if you will, capacious and irreverent, the product of a sort of stripping down. An excavation of the psyche.”

—Negar Azimi, writer, 2023

“Ultimately, it is the undefined spaces rather than any meaningful objects or animals that give Saleh’s scenes their power. In a world where so much is overdetermined, these vague interiors let uncertainty and quietude have their moment by making and holding space for what may be unsaid, unsayable.”

—Ellen Mara De Wachter, critic, 2024