The Butterfly's Burden

Lawrie Shabibi presents The Butterfly's Burden, a solo exhibition by the Egyptian painter Nada Elkalaawy, on view at the gallery's Alserkal Avenue space in Dubai from 23 September to 7 November 2026. The show opened the gallery's 2026 to 2027 season, alongside the new wave of exhibitions launching across Alserkal Avenue.

The title is borrowed from the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and, in the gallery's words, speaks to "the tension between sensitivity, beauty, and emotional weight." Across a new body of paintings built through layered processes of accumulation and erasure, Elkalaawy explores memory, loss, regeneration and the passage of time. Flowers, butterflies, domestic vessels, family photographs and ghostly figures drift between past and present, presence and absence.

Elkalaawy works from a personal photographic archive gathered over many years, from family albums and still lifes to auction catalogues and found images. Almost every painting begins as a charcoal or graphite sketch. Veiling and pentimento are central: translucent layers obscure and disrupt forms, and earlier gestures remain embedded beneath the surface, particularly where she reworks older or unfinished canvases. Silverware, tureens, candelabras and porcelain figurines become, as the gallery puts it, "repositories of memory and human presence."

The works emerged from the artist's own recent experience of loss and grief, while also giving form to hope. The butterfly serves as the central metaphor: a symbol of freedom and transformation that also carries "the burden of grief, longing, remembrance." The narratives stay deliberately open, moving from personal fragments towards wider reflections on togetherness and loneliness, love and grief, vulnerability and resilience.

The exhibition is a significant Gulf debut for an artist who divides her life between Egypt and London and whose previous solo shows include Gypsum Gallery in Cairo and Matt Carey-Williams in London. It presents painting, in the gallery's words, as "a space where memory can be materialised, carried, and renewed."