The art season continues across the UAE following the successful conclusion of Art Dubai 2026, with galleries and institutions across Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah presenting a range of exhibitions.
Current highlights include the final weeks of Picasso, The Figure at Louvre Abu Dhabi, a focused examination of Pablo Picasso’s reinvention of the human body; and From the Perspective of Language at The Third Line, where Sara Naim brings together painting and performance to examine how meaning is constructed through language and images.
Major institutional shows and gallery exhibitions continue to take stock of artistic practice in the region through photography, landscape-led works, reflective group exhibitions and landmark solo presentations.
Here are 11 exhibitions to see now in the UAE before the summer slowdown.
Jorge Tacla: Time the destroyer is time the preserver at Sharjah Art Foundation
This major solo exhibition by Chilean artist Jorge Tacla brings together works spanning more than four decades of a practice shaped by political upheaval and questions of representation.
Tacla has worked between Santiago and New York since the early 1980s and draws on personal and historical memory, informed in part by the legacy of Chile’s 1973 coup, to examine how violence and human rights are understood and recorded.
Structured across eight chapters, the exhibition presents large-scale paintings and works on paper that reflect on the shifting nature of witnessing.
Tacla’s compositions often depict architecture and landscapes in the negative, with forms defined through absence rather than presence, foregrounding the role of perception and memory in constructing meaning.
The title, drawn from a line by TS Eliot, frames a broader inquiry into destruction and preservation, as the works consider the afterlife of traumatic events and the hierarchies that shape how suffering is remembered.
