Ammar Alshawa Paints an Expressive Cry
In a Damascus studio stacked floor to ceiling with canvases, a Syrian expressionist turns feeling into musical visual texts.
ATELIERA EDITORIAL·3 MIN READ·October 22, 2026Step into Ammar Alshawa’s Damascus studio and there is almost no wall left. Portraits, birds, seascapes and still lifes climb floor to ceiling; kilims in hot pink cover the chairs; an easel in the middle holds whatever is currently being wrestled into existence. It is less a workspace than a diary kept in oil paint, decades of feeling, hung page by page.
That is precisely how Alshawa understands his work. Painting, he says, is a witness to my feelings.
The expressionist’s creed
Born in Damascus and trained at the Adham Ismail Centre for Plastic Arts, Alshawa is a member of the plastic arts union in Damascus and a lifelong expressionist, drifting at times into what he calls realistic expressionism. The labels matter less than what they serve. His portraits hold faces at the exact point where composure breaks: a woman’s eyes glassy with tears that have just fallen. His flocks of birds burn gold and orange against dark, crusted grounds, caught mid-flight between escape and return. Surfaces are thick, worked, almost geological. The feeling is never illustrated; it is built.
His own description of the goal is the best one written: paintings that become musical visual texts, an expressive cry that paints space and time.
Damascus to Madrid to Bangkok
The cry has carried. From his first solo exhibitions at Naseer Shoura Gallery in Damascus in 2004 and 2005, Alshawa’s work has travelled to the Syrian Cultural Centre in Madrid, Gallery Gaudi in Spain, Al Khanji Gallery in Aleppo during the city’s year as capital of Islamic culture in 2009, and the Al-Assad Library in Damascus in 2013. Beirut followed, with a joint exhibition at the UNESCO Palace sponsored by the Lebanese Ministry of Culture in 2015, then Goja Gallery in Bangkok in 2016 and 2017, Haishoon Gallery in Lattakia, and Ashtaar Gallery in 2021 and 2022, alongside charity exhibitions at home.
Two decades, three continents, one constant: a painter in Damascus who never stopped working, through every year when working was hardest.
The studio keeps filling. The walls keep disappearing behind new canvases. And the witness keeps testifying.
Ammar Alshawa’s work is available now on Ateliera.
"My paintings are musical visual texts, an expressive cry that paints space and time."
