Golnaz Fathi, Taking the Journey

Opera Gallery Dubai

15 April - 16 May 2026

Opera Gallery Dubai presents 'Taking the Journey', a solo exhibition of new works by Golnaz Fathi. Conceived especially for this presentation, the exhibition unveils a body of paintings created over the past two years, marking a significant moment in the artist’s evolving practice. Rooted in Persian calligraphy yet fully engaged with contemporary abstraction, these works reflect a sustained meditation on gesture, rhythm, and the expressive potential of the painted line.

A Language Beyond Words

The selection of works presented in Dubai traces the evolution of a distinctive visual language—one in which writing has moved beyond literal meaning to become a field of gesture, rhythm, and transformation. While the exhibition focuses on Fathi’s newest paintings, it is grounded in a practice developed over years of rigorous exploration, with key works now held in museum and private collections internationally.

Fathi’s paintings exist simultaneously as text and image. Letters are no longer confined to language; they become visual forms shaped by culture, memory, and lived experience. Through this process, writing is reimagined as movement—an intuitive and physical act that reveals a profound connection between language and abstraction. The line carries the trace of the body, turning the canvas into a space where thought, time, and emotion converge.

From Calligraphy to Abstraction

Fathi’s artistic foundation lies in her early and disciplined training in Persian calligraphy, a practice rooted in control, proportion, and rhythmic precision. As one of the few women to reach its highest levels—and the first to receive official Kitābat recognition from the Iranian Society of Calligraphy—she established a deep connection to a centuries-old visual tradition.

Gradually, however, her practice moved beyond the conventions of calligraphy. Legibility gave way to abstraction. Letters loosened their ties to semantic meaning, dissolving into lines, gestures, and pulses of energy across the surface. Writing and painting began to merge—not to communicate through text, but to evoke sensation and presence. Abstraction became a means of distillation, reducing experience to its most essential visual form.

Rhythm, Process, and Immersion

Rhythm plays a central role in Fathi’s work. Influenced by music, poetry, and movement, she approaches the studio as a space of immersion and sustained concentration. Repetition and improvisation coexist, allowing intuition to guide the gradual emergence of each composition. Colour punctuates the surface—at times restrained and meditative, at others vivid and charged—marking shifts in emotional intensity. Across the canvases, moments of density alternate with areas of openness, creating a dynamic balance between restraint and release. Discipline and freedom remain in constant dialogue.

In Dialogue with Adolph Gottlieb

'Taking the Journey' engages in dialogue with the legacy of Adolph Gottlieb, a key figure of postwar Abstract Expressionism. Long inspired by the movement, Fathi found particular resonance in Gottlieb’s writings and his engagement with Far Eastern philosophy—ideas that echo aspects of her own artistic path. Rather than referencing his imagery directly, she allowed the emotional force of his work to inform a slow, intuitive process that resulted in paintings that serve as both tribute and gesture of gratitude—an homage reframed through Fathi’s Middle Eastern sensibility.

In Untitled (2024), sweeping black forms traverse a muted ground, punctuated by saturated red masses that recall the symbolic tension and charged contrasts of Gottlieb’s iconic Burst paintings. These works do not replicate his visual language; instead, they re-examine shared concerns—gesture, symbol, abstraction—through a different cultural and experiential lens. In doing so, they underscore the interconnected histories of abstraction and Fathi’s position within a global field of artistic exchange.

Moving between intensity and quiet, control and spontaneity, 'Taking the Journey' invites viewers to encounter writing beyond language. In this space, abstraction becomes a shared and experiential field—one where cultural memory and contemporary expression meet, and where the act of painting itself unfolds as a journey.