Abdullatif Al Smoudi

Abdullatif Al Smoudi (1948 to 2005) was a Syrian painter born in Hama who lived and worked in the United Arab Emirates. He made abstract paintings and collages in ink, oil and mixed media on paper, card and canvas. Dense grids of symbols, letters and ornament fill the surface, usually in warm, bright colour.

He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Damascus University in 1975 and then moved to the UAE. There he taught art in military schools and worked for the Department of Culture and Information in Sharjah. He joined the Sharjah Art Museum when it opened. His student work includes watercolour still lifes. Later collages mix Arabic and Islamic motifs, carpet and ceramic patterns and cave-like inscriptions with stamps, photographs and pieces of leather. Muslim Scholars (1996) shows men and women at study around a palm tree. Hama 1982, a painting 345 cm long and 175 cm high, marks the events in his home city in the early 1980s.

Al Smoudi was a founding member of the Emirates Fine Arts Society and founded the Al Banoosh group in 1982. He served on the organising committee of the Sharjah International Biennial from 1993 to 2001. He won first prize at the Bangladesh Art Biennial in 1995 and at the Sharjah International Biennial in 1997. The Sharjah Art Museum gave him a retrospective in its Lasting Impressions series in 2013. In 2026 the Sultan Bin Ali Al Owais Cultural Foundation, Dubai, showed 75 paintings in Colours Paint a Story of Absence. Hama 1982 was shown in public there for the first time. His work is held by the Sharjah Art Museum, the Dubai Collection and the Atassi Foundation.