Bashar Alhroub | "Resurrection"

P21 Gallery present _Resurrection_, Bashar Alhroub's latest body of work, curated by Fortunata Calabró. Created in the aftermath of the devastating events that have reshaped life in Palestine since October 2023, _Resurrection_ brings together a new body of work produced during a period in which artistic practice became both a means of witnessing and sustaining life. It explores themes of loss, memory, and endurance through a language that is both deeply personal and profoundly universal. Rather than offering certainty, these works suggest the fragile possibility of renewal amid devastation. Moving between figuration and abstraction, intimacy and collective experience, Alhroub creates paintings that evoke the emotional and psychological landscapes shaped by conflict, displacement, and uncertainty. A distinctive feature of the exhibition is Alhroub's engagement with the structural logic of _Tatreez_, not as a decorative motif, but as a system of repetition, accumulation, and memory. Translated into painting through layers, textures, and gestures, its structures become a way of reflecting on fragmentation, resilience, and the process of rebuilding meaning after rupture. In Alhroub's work, Tatreez operates as a trace—a rhythm of presence and absence—where personal and collective memories intersect within the painted surface. The paintings are deliberately presented beyond the conventions of the framed image. Their exposed materiality preserves the vulnerability of the painted surface, allowing each work to remain poised between fragility and endurance. Rather than concealing the gestures that hold them in place, the installation embraces them, transforming every visible trace of support into a quiet metaphor for care and repair. In doing so, it evokes lives shaped by permanent precarity, where stability remains constantly deferred and survival itself becomes an unfinished act. In _Resurrection_, the mode of display becomes inseparable from the work's meaning: a reminder that these paintings bear witness not to a tragedy of the past, but to a history that continues to be written. The exhibition is characterised by a restrained palette dominated by red and black tones. These colours create an atmosphere that oscillates between mourning and resistance, despair and resilience, reflecting the tensions that define the contemporary Palestinian experience while remaining open to broader human concerns. While rooted in the realities of Palestine, _Resurrection_ speaks to universal questions about how individuals and communities endure periods of upheaval, how acts of creation continue in times of crisis, and how art can become a space for reflection, resistance, and renewal. Through these paintings, Alhroub invites viewers to reflect not only on the realities of conflict, but also on the enduring human capacity for hope, dignity, and transformation. In _Resurrection_, survival is never presented as triumph, but as the ongoing reconstruction of meaning through memory, care, and the everyday affirmation of life.