ATHR Gallery proudly presents a solo exhibition by newly represented artist Abdullah Al Othman.
ATHR Gallery is pleased to announce Syntax of the Ever-Changing, a highly anticipated solo exhibition by Saudi artist Abdullah Al Othman, opening on May 20 at JAX District.
Through sculpture, assemblage, photography, archival imagery and found materials, Al Othman constructs a visual language informed by the evolving architecture and material memory of the city. Drawing from observation, photography, and the gathering of archival fragments, the artist speaks the “vocabulary” of the built environment - a place continuously expanding, collapsing, accumulating and reforming. Much like poetry, his practice recombines textures, surfaces, colors and industrial remnants into new syntaxes that attempt to articulate what language alone cannot fully contain.
Working with discarded wood, corrugated metal sheets, found sepia-toned photographs, nails, steel, concrete and other found materials, Al Othman transforms these materials that are marked by time, labor and erosion into layered compositions that exist between painting, sculpture and artifact. Rusted, jagged, frayed, and worn, these surfaces become carriers of memory - holding the traces of every hand, function and force that shaped them.
The exhibition unfolds across six interconnected registers, each examining the relationship between matter, temporality and the conditions through which images, structures and histories are continuously assembled and undone. Construction debris is reassembled into framed structures where residue itself becomes the primary unit of meaning; archival and contemporary photographs are disrupted through painterly intervention; architectural materials are stripped of utility and rebuilt into dense accumulations of texture and sediment; and sculptural forms remain suspended between states of incompletion and becoming.
Among the works presented is Time Consents to Be Held, a triad of works composed of discarded formwork wood, bent nails and metal sheets retrieved from construction sites across Riyadh.
In In the Residue of Rust (2026), found formwork wood, rusted metal sheets and nails are assembled into a composition shaped by corrosion, exposure and accumulation. Meanwhile, In the Hues of Patination (2026) introduces copper sheets into the work, allowing oxidation and surface transformation to emerge as records of time itself.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, thirty-two works pairing archival photographs of Saudi Arabia from the 1970s and 1980s with found objects create speculative narratives, while concrete bricks are displaced from their structural role and reimagined as surfaces of bodily encounter and ritual use.
Originally beginning his career as a writer and poet, Al Othman continues to approach material through a literary sensibility. Across the exhibition, each work functions like a line within an unfinished poem - fragmented, and open-ended - inviting viewers to navigate, misread and reconstruct meaning through their own encounter with the work.
Syntax of the Ever-Changing opens May 20, 7-11 PM at ATHR Gallery Riyadh in the JAX Arts District.