Nour Malas presents a major solo show at The Arts Club, London. Born to Syrian parents in France and raised in Dubai, Malas spent time in London and trained in Chicago before settling in New York, where she now lives and works. As a child, she often visited Syria with her family before a fifteen-year absence from the country that only recently ended. Her work is shaped by the vantage point of searching: of growing up and adapting to multiple, overlapping places, one of them long held only in memory. Her marks are gestural and unplanned, laid down at speed and left visible: each canvas carries the record of its own making. As Malas puts it, the images she paints “are always running away” from her. 

Malas works without sketches or preparatory studies, meeting the blank canvas directly and letting each painting find its own shape as it develops. Figures surface from beneath the layers, settling into compositions that hold figuration and abstraction in tension rather than choosing between them. Earthy reds, browns and greens are cut through with sudden passages of pink, blue or yellow; a vocabulary of colour through which the exhibition’s key themes of vulnerability, memory, the pull between presence and absence, and letting it all go, emerge.

Highlights include Blue Angel (Diptych) and Living Multiplicity (both 2025), shown alongside new works, such as Stretch My Hands and Iota of Kindness (both 2026), making their debut in this exhibition. Together, the show traces the evolution of Malas’s visual language while introducing audiences to her newest body of work.