In this episode, our host Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar is joined by Miramar Al-Nayyar, the Iraqi artist whose UK solo debut opens today (July 3, 2026) at Saatchi Yates in London. Miramar is the inaugural winner of the Saatchi Yates Fellowship Prize, selected from more than 5,000 submissions worldwide. She is 29, based between Amman and Abu Dhabi, and paints with a maturity that shows in her command of atmosphere, silence, and inner force.

Her exhibition brings together paintings shaped by the vastness of the Middle Eastern desert: rock formations, flowers, solitude, and the slow intelligence of nature. Made between Lebanon and Jordan against a backdrop of conflict and unrest, these are not abstract landscapes. They are meditations on endurance, on what can still bloom under pressure.

At the centre of the exhibition is the desert rose: a formation at once geological and floral, mineral and symbolic. In Miramar's hands it becomes visionary, a flower of the mind that emerges from silence, heat, distance, and memory. Her surfaces hold that tension between barrenness and abundance, fragility and force, the physical world and the invisible one. The work draws from desert landscapes and natural movement, but also from meditation, seclusion, and the ornamental rhythms of classical Islamic geometry. The paintings unfold like inner architectures: psychedelic, atmospheric, embodied. Her process is intuitive and physical, gesture as a way of listening. She paints less to depict nature than to receive it.

What stayed with me was the spiritual depth of our conversation. We spoke about art as a form of surrender, about solitude as a creative condition, about the desert as both real landscape and inner state, about how images arrive from somewhere beyond language.

Something in the way Miramar speaks about nature, intuition, prayer, and the unseen resonated with me. It reminded me that painting, at its most powerful, is not only visual. It can be a vessel for transformation, a way of making contact with what is buried, what is sacred, and what is still becoming. We speak about the desert rose, movement, memory, meditation, conflict, hope, and what it means for a young Iraqi artist to bring this personal, spiritually charged visual language into her first UK solo show.

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