HALA ABBAS
Location:
London, UK
ARTIST BIO
Hala Abbas is a UK-based multidisciplinary artist working across painting and sculptural form. She holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Printmaking and is currently undertaking a Master’s in Creative Practice. Her work has been exhibited and collected internationally, with audiences in both the UK and the United States.
Her practice explores inner thresholds, emotional landscapes and the experience of return: to the body, to memory and to a deeper sense of self. She is interested in moments of transition: states of crossing, guarding, descent and quiet emergence.
Working intuitively, she allows gesture, material and atmosphere to guide each piece. Her work often moves between abstraction and figuration, holding figures that feel partially revealed or held within space, as if suspended between worlds. Recurrent motifs include vessels, gates, and solitary forms, suggesting protection, devotion and inner authority.
Her ongoing body of work, Unearthed / Becoming, functions as a visual language for internal transformation. She approaches art as a container: a place where meaning is not fixed, but felt.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work arises from moments of internal crossing. Times when something familiar dissolves and something unnamed begins to take shape. I am drawn to spaces of depth and liminality: thresholds, underworlds, waters and guarded interiors. For me, these are not places of spectacle, they are places of listening.
I work intuitively, often allowing layers of paint, erosion and gesture to determine the image. Figures emerge slowly, sometimes obscured, sometimes barely held within the surface. They are not portraits, but states of being — carriers of feeling rather than narrative. Abstraction and figuration coexist, mirroring the way inner experience resists clear definition.
Across this body of work, colour and texture function symbolically. Blues and darkened fields suggest immersion and emotional depth; earthen tones and gold hint at containment, devotion and value. Repetition and restraint are intentional, creating a rhythm that invites the viewer inward rather than outward.
I am interested in art as a vessel, something that can hold grief, transformation and becoming without the need to resolve them. The work offers a pause — a space where viewers can meet their own inner landscapes and sit with complexity without needing to name it.
