From November 5-December 12, Aria Art Gallery shows Crossing the Ascent: The Weight of Light, a solo exhibition by Bahraini artist Hala Al Khalifa, curated by Mohamed Ogbi. Tucked into Borgo Santi Apostoli, a few steps from the Arno, the gallery makes a fitting host, since Florence — and the majestic river running through it — appears in the work itself.
Al Khalifa studied fine arts in the United States and the United Kingdom, taught at the University of Bahrain, and rose to senior posts at cultural institutions, including Director General of Culture and Arts at the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities. In 2015 she founded an artist residency in Doha, and her work is held by the Arab Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Bahrain, the Saudi Art Council and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts. It’s a career that ties art to place and people. Her practice is just as deliberate, with paintings that tend to emerge from tension more often than tranquility.
That tension pervades this new work, which was painted over months when the skies above Bahrain were anything but calm. Her easel became a space to hold her ground as she kept painting through the uncertainty, in defiance rather than retreat. Built around memory, identity and resistance, the exhibition brings together two bodies of work: large canvases and a series of circular paintings.
The large canvases face outward, towards the city’s architecture. Bridges arc over still water and domes and towers rise through soft tones of rose and pale blue, while one long panorama traces the river and rooftops of Florence, a nod to the city hosting the exhibition. A series of night scenes returns to the same buildings in a deeper, subtly dramatic blue, their arches reflected in the river below.
The circular works turn inward, towards the artist’s home in Bahrain. Several are painted on gold grounds, and together with their circular shape they echo Florence’s own gilded altarpieces and Renaissance tondi. Their forms come from the body and the sea: rib cages and spines, shells and seedpods, and the woven fish traps found along Bahrain’s coast. Fine vertical lines fall through them like rain or the threads of a loom, and the palette warms to peach, coral, and burnt orange, a contrast to the cool blues of the cityscapes.
Light connects the two series and carries the exhibition’s central idea: that something usually thought of as weightless can be made to bear weight. In Al Khalifa’s deepening blues and settled golds, sky, sea, and loom take on an almost physical presence, and resistance is pictured not as an ascent to a triumphant summit but as a crossing, moving sideways against the current, from the shores of Bahrain to the banks of the Arno.
It’s an exhibition that rewards the viewer’s steady attention, and asks what an artist can still build beneath the heaviest of skies.
Opening hours Monday – Saturday, 10.30am – 1.30pm | 3.30pm – 7.30pm
