Rose-like

Rose-like is a solo exhibition of paintings by the Palestinian artist Mohamed Saleh Khalil at Bab idDeir Art Gallery in Ramallah, open from 26 September to 10 November 2026. The works are framed paintings of bouquets standing in vases, hung around the gallery's space in the old city of Ramallah.

At first glance the paintings seem to show familiar flowers. The gallery's wall text says that a closer look undoes that impression, since the forms are only rose-like. In its account, the series marks a change in how Khalil paints, following a long period of war, loss, displacement and destruction in Palestine. The flowers are presented as growing out of that difficult reality rather than covering it. A later note from the gallery frames the show as less about roses than about what art can do with circumstances that cannot be changed.

Writing in Oman Daily on 1 October 2026, Tahseen Yaqeen described a gallery filled with flowers and vases, with a sky blue running through many of the paintings. He noted one picture in which a drinking glass takes the place of a vase. He also pointed to an inexact, childlike way of drawing the flowers, which he linked to the idea of a likeness rather than the thing itself.

Khalil was born in 1960 in Al-Zarqa, Jordan, and completed an MA at an art academy in Dresden in 1988. He has lived and worked in Ramallah since 1994, where he founded the Young Artists Forum to teach art to children and teenagers. In 2000 he received the Jury Prize at the Alexandria Biennale. The exhibition opened on 26 September 2026 with an opening from 6pm to 8pm.