In the cool glass atrium of ICD Brookfield Place, Dubai’s most meticulously composed business address, something quietly euphoric has taken root. Suspended forms twist mid-air; shades of cobalt and coral shimmer in the filtered light. The space hums with a kind of optimism – unexpected, perhaps, for the middle of the DIFC.
This is High Spirits, the new installation by Saudi artist Nasser Almulhim, commissioned by ICD Brookfield Place Arts and was unveiled on November 5. It’s a show that asks us to feel abstraction rather than simply view it – to walk through colour, and breathe it in.
Painting, Untethered
Almulhim’s work has long orbited around the relationship between geometry, psychology, and the spiritual self. But here, for the first time, his familiar shapes have escaped the flat plane of the canvas. Forms drawn from his paintings rise from the floor and hang from the ceiling, drifting like fragments of thought made physical. Around them, three glowing canvases pulse with vessel-like figures – not static icons, but points of emotional entry.
“With High Spirits I wanted to treat colour as something you can walk into and absorb,” Almulhim explains. “Painting has always been a way for me to align the inner world with the outer. In this exhibition, that gesture becomes communal – the shapes leave the canvas, they move into the same air we breathe.”
It’s an installation that feels, fittingly, alive. The works ripple and react to their surroundings; even the architecture seems to loosen its collar. The corporate lobby becomes something else entirely – not a transit zone, but a place to stay and feel inspired.
Almulhim, who was born in Riyadh in 1988 and studied in Florida, has always walked the line between form and freedom. In High Spirits, that tension becomes literal: organic silhouettes dance between the sharp planes of ICD Brookfield’s Summer Garden, their presence softening the hard edges of modernity.
There’s a certain type of symbolism to this. Here, in the heart of a financial district, abstraction becomes a language of release – a subtle rebellion against routine. As Malak Abu-Qaoud, ICD Brookfield Place’s Director of Arts & Events, puts it, “Bringing his paintings to life as shapes that take over the Summer Garden feels like stepping back into childhood – playful, sweet and full of joy.”
And joy, in Almulhim’s world, isn’t frivolous. It’s radical. Colour, he insists, is energy – a medium for transformation. The artist draws on spiritual practice and psychological introspection to remind us that even in our most controlled environments, the human impulse to feel, to play, and to reconnect with wonder is still very much alive.
High Spirits lands in Dubai at a fitting time. The city’s art scene has never been more ambitious, yet Almulhim’s work stands apart for its refusal to shout. It doesn’t demand attention – it earns it, through a easing assertion that beauty and reflection belong everywhere, even in a place built for productivity.
As visitors drift through the installation, they may find themselves slowing down, recalibrating. The piece is, after all, a kind of collective meditation – one that bridges the inner and outer self, the individual and the architectural.
It’s art as antidote, and in a world forever rushing, that feels like a luxury worth taking seriously.
