Walking into Two Clouds in the Night Sky at the Cultural Foundation, visitors step into a world that feels alive—an ecosystem shaped by colour, rhythm, and an almost meditative sense of growth. In this immersive solo exhibition, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim reveals the full scope of a practice that has quietly shaped the UAE’s contemporary art landscape for decades.
Best known for his papier-mache sculptures, Ibrahim’s universe is populated by insect-like creatures, tree forms rendered in neon and pastel hues, and abstract organisms that seem to breathe and shift with the surrounding space. Chairs become beings, towers sprout textured surfaces, and canvases pulse with microbial constellations. Rather than isolated artworks, each piece functions as part of a wider, interconnected environment.
While Ibrahim has long been a familiar presence in group exhibitions and art fairs, Two Clouds in the Night Sky marks a rare moment of concentration. Here, the artist’s world unfolds without interruption, allowing viewers to experience the depth, coherence, and emotional resonance of his vision. Though the exhibition includes works spanning decades, it resists the structure of a conventional retrospective.
Co-curated by Noor Al Mehairbi and Medyyah Al Tamimi, the exhibition is organised into four thematic sections, each reflecting a different mode of engagement with nature, memory, and the subconscious. The largest section, In Transit, gathers sculptures and paintings into a dense, forest-like formation. The curation avoids privileging any single work, instead encouraging viewers to navigate the space as a living landscape—one that can be experienced from above, below, or within.
At the heart of the exhibition is Time/Place/Void, a new site-specific commission created especially for the Abu Dhabi presentation. Comprising four interconnected rooms saturated in vivid colour and inscribed with Ibrahim’s signature linear drawings, the installation invites visitors to move physically through the artist’s thought processes. The experience is immersive, disorienting, and unexpectedly uplifting.
Other sections shift pace and tone. Traces Made Visible presents monochrome works that distil Ibrahim’s practice to line, texture, and movement, offering a moment of visual quiet. Shapeshifters centres on the Sitting Man series—an image repeated meditatively across decades, originating from an accidental photograph of the artist’s mentor, Hassan Sharif.
The final section reconnects Ibrahim’s work to land and place, drawing on archival materials from early interventions such as Draped Trees and Khorfakkan Circles. These projects reveal a practice rooted in physical engagement with landscape long before “land art” entered local artistic vocabulary.
Rather than looking backward, Two Clouds in the Night Sky feels expansive and forward-looking. It positions Ibrahim not simply as a pioneer, but as an artist still actively shaping new worlds—inviting viewers to slow down, look closely, and inhabit a forest grown from imagination, memory, and mark-making.
Location: Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi
On view until: 22 February 2026
