Metamorphoses in Paint and Consciousness

Before I Turn Into Gold, 2026, shines a light on the acts of transformation at the heart of Nour Malas's new paintings; transformations that play out in paint and in both the consciousness of the artist in her making, and the viewers in their witnessing. The work is a sumptuous, abstract water-/land-/inner-scape – a vast patchwork of different brushstrokes and viscosities that accumulate, the interdependent parts in a visual symphony of fluctuating tempos. Within a sophisticated palette of purples, mauves, reds and greens, laced with luminous trails and drips of coloured light, the predominance of blue invokes connections to water and sky and their concomitant correlations to serenity and spirituality.

Nour Malas, Before I Turn Into Gold, 2026

A more churned-up vision of nature can be found in Sentimental Melody, 2026; here the intense physicality of Malas's mark-making unleashes a chronicle of personal and global chaos, of love and loss. A panoply of translucent and saturated layers of paint in circular and cascading rhythms inflected with pale, vaporous drips and incandescent smudges of pastel, converges on a predominantly blood-red epicentre. A molten, agitated tapestry of colours and gestures at the painting's core is crowned by an atmospheric layer alluding to an ethereal realm of clouds and sky, and then falls into a tranquil pool of shimmering reflections. At once turbulent and still, illuminating and open-ended, Malas's portrayal of nature is a tour de force of abstract painting at its most free; it charts her open-hearted journey as she navigates her inner and external worlds.

Born in France in 1995, Malas grew up between Europe and Dubai and spent her childhood holidays with family back in Syria. While there, she often accompanied her mother on studio visits where she was drawn not only to the art and artmaking but also to the artists' conviction that their practice was vital to Syrian culture and society. In 2011, as part of the larger Arab Spring, peaceful demonstrations calling for democratic reform gave way to violence and mass arrests by President Bashar al-Assad's government, and subsequently civil war. As a result, Malas and her family did not return to Syria for fourteen years. From afar, they watched with anguish the nightmare and suffering their country had to endure.

Malas studied photography and sculpture at Goldsmiths in London and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Unable to return to her country, she began to understand more deeply the connection she felt to her roots; in an interview with Vogue Arabia in 2025 she expressed her appreciation for how much Syrian art had 'infiltrated and become part of my soul.'  She turned to painting for the greater immediacy and spontaneity it offered, and the ways in which it allowed her to engage in an intuitive exploration of her emotional and psychological state. Malas found her voice in large-scale, all-over, abstract landscapes that perpetually shift and move with spiralling energies; their blurred and reflective planes are animated by filaments of paint, their otherworldly passages of light glow and pulsate, creating episodic incidents across time and space. Submitting to unarticulated feelings, instincts and vulnerabilities to guide the marks that pour out across the canvas, Malas evolved a vibrant, abstract language within which issues of identity, community, belonging and displacement lie encoded.

The fall of al-Assad's regime in December 2024 elicited a collective euphoria, and this optimism, shared by Malas, was poured into a body of new work full of buoyant energy, a brighter palette, and the fugitive appearance of figures excavated out of layers of paint. The long-awaited return to Syria proved to be a life-defining moment for the artist who experienced a sense of belonging that she never thought she would know again. But the exhilaration of liberation was tempered by the sobering realisation of all the loss and destruction. In December 2025, Malas unveiled a four-panel, abstracted narrative painting documenting her relationship to her homeland, from childhood until after the war, through a realistic but hopeful lens in which resilience and renewal go hand in hand with devastation and grief.

The new oil and pastel paintings exhibited in Alchemies come as an exhale between periods of agitation and letting go. Relying on nature as both a site of and respite from action, the works arrive at a place that is simultaneously an end and a rebirth. They exist as vibrant, verdant landscapes that scale the heights to spiritual realms even as they tumble into contemplative spaces of reflection. Malas grapples with politics and the realities of the external world as much as her own internal struggles – each an echo of the other. Conflating reality, dreams, memory and hope, she has taken abstraction to a place where she can mine the richness inherent in the relationship between painting and self-discovery. By surrendering to the spontaneity and physicality of both the process and the medium, the artist and viewer, alike, experience the powerful potential of metamorphosis.

Susan Harris is an independent curator and writer on contemporary art. She is based in New York.
Text © Susan Harris, 2026