As if speaking directly from the sleeping state, Albraehe drives us towards the world of dreams, a place in which the familiar is made uncanny, forms before us morphing as we look. As the seeking eye moves over the canvas, body becomes mountain, head, then stone, and the viewer is drawn to search out a foothold in the spaces created between one form and another, and in turn between waking life and sleep. 

The paintings of Albraehe take the viewer into intimate moments, both disorienting and haunting, reminders of the power of unknowing, a reality of existence often forgotten or underplayed. Here, such spaces of unknowing, the uncanny, take center stage. 

What is a dream but a place not to be hidden. 

What is a place but a dream. 

Born in Syria in 1991, Anas Albraehe is a Beirut-based artist who primarily works in painting and theatre performance. He received a bachelor’s degree in painting and drawing in 2014 from the Fine Arts University of Damascus, Syria. After the onset of war in Syria, he relocated to Lebanon and obtained an MA in Psychology and Art Therapy from the Lebanese University in 2015. Albraehe’s solo exhibitions include Mother Earth (2020) and The Dream Catcher (2018) at Agial Art Gallery in Lebanon, and Manal, which was held respectively in Artspace Hamra in Lebanon and in Wadi Finan in Jordan, in 2017. He has also participated in several group exhibitions, including the Middle East Institute Gallery in Washington DC, USA (2019); Capkuwait Gallery, organized by Selections Magazine in Kuwait (2018); Artspace Hamra in Lebanon (2016); and Albraehe Gallery in Bahrain (2015). In 2016-2017, Albraehe participated in SAFIR TA’AROF 2017, an artist workshop as part of the Sharjah Art Biennial. Artist Residency at La Cité International Des Arts, Paris, 2020