Frieze Abu Dhabi 2026

Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi, 19 - 22 November 2026 
Overview
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Shaikha Al Mazrou Untitled, 2026, Wet coated steel, 165 x 168 x 25 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Lawrie Shabibi.
Shaikha Al Mazrou Untitled, 2026, Wet coated steel, 165 x 168 x 25 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Lawrie Shabibi.
Booth D09

For the inaugural edition of Frieze Abu Dhabi, Lawrie Shabibi presents works by Hamra Abbas (b. 1976, Pakistan), Shaikha Al Mazrou (b. 1988, UAE) and Mandy El-Sayegh (b. 1985, Selangor, Malaysia). Bringing together three distinct approaches to material, abstraction and perception, the presentation considers how artists draw on historical languages and visual systems to examine the ways we construct, experience and interpret the world around us.  

 

At the centre of the presentation is a shared engagement with material transformation. Abbas’s constructed marble inlays draw on the ornamental traditions of Mughal architecture, translating botanical forms and imagined landscapes into intricate stone compositions. Al Mazrou manipulates painted steel through folding, bending and compression, producing sculptures that apparent lightness belies the weight and industrial nature of their material. El-Sayegh’s Net-Grid (missing eye) (2023) approaches the question of perception through a layered visual language in which painted grids structure and obscure fragments of imagery and information. Bringing together sculptural installation and paintings, the presentation considers how established visual languages can be revisited and disrupted. 

 

Abbas’s practice centres on pietra dura, a centuries-old technique involving the precise cutting and assembly of coloured stones into intricate compositions. Repositioning this historically decorative practice within a contemporary framework, she explores landscape, memory, ecology and cultural exchange.  

 

Al Mazrou’s pracitice reflect on the supple and fine properties of paper, folding and creasing them into various shapes and forms. These coloured delicate prototypes are then transmuted into larger scale stainless-steel sculptures that are wet coated in vivid colours. In these unassuming places, shapes from stainless steel are cut, welded, folded and inflated. The flat and rounded surfaces, and rising and descending folds, resemble giant displays of origami. Betraying the function and fixed property of the material, their vibrant colours and forms lend them an element of playfulness and surprise.  

 

Mandy El-Sayegh works across diverse media to examine how social, cultural and political orders are formed and deconstructed in the contemporary world. In her large-scale paintings, she collages disparate fragments of information together, interrogating how meaning emerges through the relationship between different source materials. In Net-Grid (missing eye) the “missing eye” becomes a metaphor for incomplete perception, damaged vision and the ways political violence, media and personal memory shape what can and cannot be seen. The fragmented body and obscured image reflect El-Sayegh’s broader interest in how information is layered, reconstructed and given meaning through shifting contexts.  

 

Together, Abbas, Al Mazrou and El-Sayegh offer three distinct approaches to the relationship between material, structure and perception. Moving between ornament and geometry, craft and industrial production, visibility and concealment, their works demonstrate how inherited visual languages can be transformed to question how history, information and experience are seen and understood in the present. 

 

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