Lama Almoayyed — Bahraini Oil Painter

Growing up, I trailed my architect father around construction sites in Bahrain. While he moved through half-built houses checking walls and foundations, I sat on the bare concrete floors and drew, whole worlds, in chalk, on the ground beneath us.

After studying Law and Sociology in New Zealand, I spent years working in human rights. The work was meaningful and heavy, and painting became the place I went to process. To turn what I was feeling into something visual.

My paintings are surreal, but grounded. Each canvas is dense with chosen objects: a mask, a fish, a child's toy. Things that belong to a specific moment, a specific feeling, placed together until they start to mean something new. I paint grief, collective trauma, the texture of particular years. The figures I draw are obscured or altered, people absorbed in their own worlds. The viewer is always slightly outside, witnessing rather than being addressed. I work in the space between documentation and dream, and find, there, something worth painting.

For commissions, enquiries, press, or just to say hello, get in touch.