My conversations with Syrian collectors (by the way, I genuinely recommend to read the stories of Zina Khair and Line Kouwatli) has inspired me to dig deeper into Syria's contemporary art scene.

After all, a country with such an extraordinary history — one that has also carried the weight of years of conflict — rarely produces artists without something meaningful to say. If anything, the Syrian artists I have come across have some of the most compelling stories behind their work.

So today, we are looking at a handful of contemporary Syrian artists whose names are well worth knowing. This is by no means a definitive list — in fact, it could very easily become a Part Two (or even Part Three). But for now, let's begin with the first selection.

Noor Bahjat is the sort of artist you might call an open book — though not because her work is simple or naive. Quite the opposite. Her paintings are, in many ways, snapshots of her subconscious. Rather than carefully planning every piece, she lets memory, imagination and emotion do the heavy lifting, allowing them to surface on the canvas almost unfiltered. Every object, every corner of the canvas, is symbolic and quietly loaded with emotional clues.

Her work is instantly recognisable, and here is the fun bit: that unmistakable style was actually born out of a weakness. Back at university, she struggled with linear perspective — that fiddly skill requiring three-dimensional imagination and a dash of maths. Rather than grind away at conventional technique, she leaned into it and embraced flatter, symbol-packed compositions instead. Safe to say it worked. Today, she is one of the best-known and most widely followed contemporary Syrian artists.

If I had to pick one work to sum up her whole practice, it would be Back in Time — a surreal meditation on Palmyra's tug-of-war between its rich cultural heritage and the quieter forces of modernisation and globalisation. Palmyra, one of the most famous ancient cities of the Middle East, sets the stage: through the figure of Queen Zenobia, the ruins of the ancient city, a futuristic spacecraft, and a web of symbolic imagery, Noor asks whether culture can truly survive war, modernity, and globalisation.

If one were to name the Syrian artists whose reputation stretches well beyond the Middle East, Sara Shamma would surely be among the very first to come up. In 2004, she took 4th Prize at the prestigious BP Portrait Award at London's National Portrait Gallery, and by 2010 had become a Celebrity Partner of the UN World Food Programme. One could go on, but that already feels like sufficient evidence to make the point.

Shamma works almost exclusively in oils, creating large-scale figurative portraits. She has always maintained that her work is about humanity rather than politics — though, in her case, the two are difficult to separate. After fleeing Syria in 2012, following a car bomb explosion outside her home, she turned her attention to people whose lives had been forever altered by war.

What sets her apart is that she isn't painting quiet, stylised portraits — she paints real people, from photographs and from life, those who have lived through the very worst. Every wrinkle, scar, expression and glance becomes part of the story she is trying to tell.

I will admit I am not fond of being vague when describing someone's style, so it is better shown than told. Take her World Civil War Portraits — a series built entirely around what war does to people. The premise is simple: surviving a war makes you fortunate, but it doesn't mean you walk away unmarked. The loss, the trauma, the fear — these things stay. Forever, long after the fighting ends.

Another Syrian artist whose creative journey is inseparable from both his personal history and his homeland, Tammam Azzam explores memory through architecture. How exactly? Rather than depicting people, he reconstructs cities — layering fragments of real places with imagined ones to create landscapes that exist somewhere between recollection and reality. That interest in reconstruction extends beyond paint alone. Before becoming a full-time artist, Azzam worked as a graphic designer, a background that naturally found its way into his practice and explains why his work moves between painting, collage and digital photomontage.

Here is a rather telling detail: before he left Syria for rural Germany, the cities on his canvas were rendered almost entirely in black and white — a curious illustration of just how much an artist's surroundings shape their hand. It was only after settling in Germany that he turned to colour, though he says the connection to Syria never quite left him; instead, it resurfaced through memories of the countryside of his childhood.

Tammam Azzam has created plenty of surreal architectural works, but the piece I would point you towards is Freedom Graffiti. The digital collage places Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss across the shattered façade of a bomb-damaged building in Syria. The contrast is deliberate: one of the world’s most recognisable symbols of love, set against a backdrop of ruin. There is something quietly fitting, too, in the fact that the image was never actually painted on the wall — it is a digital illusion laid over very real destruction, as if to suggest that war leaves nothing, not even meaning, entirely intact.

Randa Maddah is living proof of something psychologists have long sought to understand: that childhood experiences walk alongside us, hand in hand, for the whole of our lives. Here is Randa's story: she was born in a Druze village in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights — a place that has existed in a kind of political limbo since 1967. For decades, the region's inhabitants lived with a peculiar sort of uncertainty: Syrian on paper, yet physically cut off from Syria itself. And "cut off" meant exactly that — Randa has spoken of relatives living just a few kilometres away whom she could never actually meet. A ceasefire line separated them, one ordinary people simply weren't allowed to cross.

Yet rather than depicting the conflict itself, Maddah is drawn to what remains after it: the land, memory, and the complicated idea of belonging. "Home" is the constant thread running through her work, whatever medium she happens to be reaching for — drawing, installation, photography or video performance. And for Maddah, home is inseparable from the landscape itself. Having grown up among the mountains, orchards and waterfalls of the Golan Heights, she has often spoken about picking cherries and apples with her family, walking through forests and watching the seasons change — the sort of quiet rituals that root a person to a place long before they realise it.

One work that captures Maddah's exploration of home in the context of conflict particularly well is Light Horizon, a video in which she carries out ordinary domestic chores inside a home that has since been destroyed. It poses a quiet but difficult question: can a place still feel like home once history has erased so much of it?