Hide and Seek
By Hassan Sandouka and Malik Abu Salameh
Bab idDeir Art Gallery, Bethlehem
April 17 to May 20, 2026
With Between Color and Meaning, Bab idDeir Art Gallery presents for the first time in Bethlehem a solo exhibition by the prominent Palestinian artist Jawad Ibrahim. The exhibition brings together a collection of his recent paintings and sculptures in a visual experience that moves between memory, freedom, and the complexity of human existence. The exhibition offers viewers an opportunity to enter Ibrahim’s distinctive artistic world, where colors and forms extend beyond aesthetics and become a language through which life, emotion, and experience are communicated.
Born in Nablus in 1953, Jawad Ibrahim began his artistic journey in 1975 and has developed a practice that spans nearly five decades. Throughout his career, he has worked with a variety of materials and mediums, including stone, ink, oil colors, painting, and sculpture, continuously expanding his artistic language while remaining rooted in his lived experience and environment. He has held more than sixteen solo exhibitions and participated in numerous collective exhibitions, biennials, festivals, and artistic symposia locally and internationally. His long artistic journey has established him as an important voice within Palestinian visual art.
What distinguishes Ibrahim’s work is the way he merges heritage with modernity, memory with imagination, and personal experience with collective realities. His paintings do not simply document people or places; they reconstruct them through a highly personal visual language. The exhibition includes a selection of portraits and figures inspired by people, neighborhoods, and moments that have crossed the artist’s life and memory. Yet these figures do not appear as realistic representations. Instead, they emerge as transformed presences that belong to a world suspended between reality and imagination.
Alongside these portraits, Ibrahim’s abstract works reveal a visual universe rich with movement and symbolism. Houses lean, bodies bend, figures seem to recline, pray, or search for their place within unstable spaces. Forms refuse strict order and instead follow an internal rhythm that feels deeply human.
For Jawad Ibrahim, freedom is not merely a subject represented in art – it is a practice enacted through the creative process itself. His liberated use of color and form suggests that identity does not always require direct symbols. In his work, Palestine emerges through memory, place, and the persistent desire to reshape the world through color and meaning.
