Nour Malas explores transient emotions and the in-between. Her gestural, bold, and expressive brushstrokes give the paintings an almost sculptural sense. Her spontaneous and intuitive marks—signatures of Malas’s distinctive pictorial language—are a direct response to her environment. Expressions of curiosity, rage, and desperation, the mark making invites viewers to immerse themselves in poignant landscape, both internal and uncharted. Movement is muse as Malas follows forms (figures, animals, an occasional vehicle) along the image. The compositions fall within the link of past and present, depicting subtly moving figures within layers that exist between dream and reality. Using light and darkness to highlight these figures, and relying on the immediacy of painting, she explores the automation of memories appearing.

By making work that quite literally relates to her own body, Malas’s practice conveys ideas of what it’s like to be in a body and within a space: its gestures, its scale, and its preconscious memories. Led by a ceaseless exploration of emotive and psychological spaces, Malas intricately weaves movement and introspection into her compositions.