Ahmad Tallaa Syrian, b. 1994

Ahmad Tallaa (b. 1994, Damascus, Syria; lives and works in Sharjah, UAE) is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, printmaking, handmade paper, and material fabrication. He studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Damascus (2012–2017), and received the Spring Annual Exhibition Award from the Syrian Ministry of Culture for Best Artwork in both 2017 and 2019.

Tallaa's practice is rooted in the physical act of making — he fabricates many of his own tools and materials, treating the studio process as a form of inquiry rather than production. His works bear visible evidence of this: layered surfaces eroded and rebuilt, forms that hover between emergence and disappearance, compositions shaped by pressure, time, and material resistance. He approaches each work not with a predetermined image in mind, but through sustained observation — allowing forms to surface from the material itself.

Central to his work is the experience of living under the shadow of conflict. The instability, displacement, and sensory texture of wartime Damascus have left a deep imprint on his visual language: surfaces that recall rubble and ruin, figures that dissolve before they can fully cohere, marks that speak of both presence and erasure.

This sensibility extends beyond his visual practice. Tallaa also crafts musical instruments by hand, among them the ney, a traditional reed flute, and plays both ney and oud. For him, music and visual art share the same impulse: a need for expression that no single medium can fully contain.