Roots Before Petals: Lana Khayat in dialogue with Etel Adnan and Helen Khal opened at the Bassam Freiha Art Foundation in Abu Dhabi on 17 October 2026. It runs until 17 January 2027. At its centre is Dessine-moi un pays, le Liban, a new set of five paintings by Lana Khayat. Each canvas measures 170 by 220 centimetres and combines oil and acrylic with thread and silk. The work then leaves the wall as three-dimensional flowers spread over a carpet of grass, which visitors can walk through.

Khayat, a Lebanese painter born in 1983, has made the lily her main motif, reading it as a figure for the resilience of women. Her paintings set the flower among signs taken from the ancient Tifinagh and Phoenician scripts. In the new series the flowers grow into a whole setting, and Lebanon appears as a landscape made of blooms. Hafez Gallery, founded in Jeddah in 2014, lends the paintings and has worked with her for about ten years.

The works by Etel Adnan and Helen Khal come from the Olivier Mestelan Pfaehler Collection, held by a collector based in Abu Dhabi. Adnan (1925 to 2021), poet as well as painter, laid landscape down in flat planes of colour with a palette knife. For decades she returned to one subject, Mount Tamalpais in California, seen from her window. Khal (1923 to 2009) arrived at abstraction through fields of colour, starting from flowers and land. The show includes her Water Jug, 1964, a work on paper mounted on wood, in acrylic and oil pastel.

Khayat counts both women among the artists she admires, and the exhibition sets three generations side by side through one shared theme, the natural motif and the memory of home. It forms part of From a Shared Ground, the foundation's season of Lebanese art, with Paul Guiragossian: 100 Years of Art and Alfred Basbous: Sculpting the Line. Entry is free, and the foundation opens every day from 10am to 8pm.