Culture & Arts
Bashar Alhroub paints Gaza's resurrection in red at a London gallery
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The largest canvas in the room is nearly three metres wide and it is called Resurrection #7. Acrylic, painted in 2025, two hundred by two hundred and ninety-five centimetres. It hangs at P21 Gallery in London until 28 August, at the end of a show the painter Bashar Alhroub has been building since the autumn of 2023.
Alhroub was born in Jerusalem in 1978, grew up in Hebron, and lives and works in Ramallah. He took his first degree in fine arts at An-Najah National University in Nablus.
A Ford Foundation fellowship then carried him to the Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton, where he completed a master's in 2010. Two years later he won the first grand prize at the fifteenth Asian Art Biennale in Bangladesh.
A palette that refuses the middle#
The exhibition, curated by Fortunata Calabrò, gathers paintings made after October 2023 and asks what a war does inside human memory rather than in front of a camera.
The colour is the argument. Alhroub works in a narrow register dominated by reds and blacks and keeps grey out of it deliberately — a refusal, in his own account of the choice, of the grey areas people reach for when they discuss what Israel has done in Gaza. The result is not a documentary wall. It is a space of mourning that also holds its ground.
Embroidery runs through the canvases as a visual element rather than a decorative one: the stitch that repairs and the stitch that shows where the tear was, standing in for both fragmentation and endurance.
Where the work sits#
Alhroub has never been a single-medium painter. Photography, video installation, drawing and painting have all carried the same preoccupation across two decades — identity as something a place keeps rewriting, and the passage a Palestinian is permanently in the middle of, the subject he gave the title Land of Salt.
Resurrection is the same enquiry after a rupture that reorganised everything he was painting. The title is not consolation and it is not a metaphor for victory. It is the word for what a body does when it will not stay where it was put.
P21 is a registered charity on Chalton Street in north London that describes itself as a charitable trust promoting contemporary Arab art and culture. A London summer gives this work an audience that will never see it anywhere near Ramallah.
The show closes on Friday. What stays afterwards is the fact of the work having been made at all — thirty-odd months of a war, and a painter in Ramallah answering it at the scale of a wall.
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