Red is one of the oldest and most loaded colours in human history. It is love, blood, warning, desire, revolution — sometimes all at once. And in contemporary art from the region, it keeps showing up, but the reasons behind it couldn't be more different. Some artists use red to talk about love that hurts. Others turn it into a signature so recognisable it becomes almost a second name. And for some, it is not about meaning at all — it is about material, weight, and what a colour does to a body in space.

For Abdulaziz Al-Hosni, colour is always a language. Each shade expresses a different emotional state, a new chapter in the experience of love.

In his series Qalb Mahmood, red appears as the most intense and dangerous form of love. Not the romantic beginning (that is pink, soft and innocent), not the uncertainty in the middle (blue), not even the harmony that follows (green). Red comes later, when love has weight.

"Red is love that could hurt," Al-Hosni says. "I've always had a fear of blood. So red, for me, became something complicated. It was love, yes — but real love. Love that could hurt."

In one of the series' most powerful works, a group of men perform the traditional Razha dance, arranged in the shape of a heart. The floor beneath them is red. They dance anyway. Because in Al-Hosni's world, struggle isn't something to escape — it is something to move through.

Jumairy is an Emirati artist from Dubai known for large-scale performances and installations. You might recognise him by the bunny mask he always wears — a habit that started as a way to manage stage anxiety and turned into a tool for protecting privacy and staying present without the noise of visibility.

Red has been so central to his practice that he describes it simply as "the colour of Jumairy." The reasoning is simple: "Red is the colour of love, of passion. That's the reason I use it for the cult."

If you know his work, you know the images: the red Nissan Patrol, the performers of The Mission: Jumairy Loves You walking in head-to-toe red, handing strangers a CD and saying nothing but his name. Red isn't just a colour choice for Jumairy — it is a statement and a world unto itself.

Nasser Almulhim is a painter and sculptor from Riyadh, and one of the most recognised names in contemporary Saudi art. His canvases are dense with saturated colour — floating geometric and organic forms that feel charged, almost alive.

Colour, for Almulhim, is never decorative. It is therapeutic. He has spoken openly about dealing with depression from a young age and turning to painting as a way to process it. What emerged was a practice built around the belief that certain colours carry healing energy.

"In painting, I like colours that bring happiness and might heal you," he says. "It puts you in a state of mind that doesn't numb you, but makes you disconnect from the distraction around you."

Red in his work sits inside a charged, saturated palette — alongside vivid pinks, oranges, yellows, and blues — and it is never passive. His practice draws from Jungian psychology, spirituality, and the geometry he absorbed growing up among Riyadh's architecture. What links it all is the belief that colour is a form of communication between the inner world and the outer one: a frequency you can set.

"The use of colours in my painting might bring some joy or trigger some hidden trauma," he says. "And that's what I wanted to get across."

Alia Ahmad is a painter from Riyadh. In 2024, she became one of the most talked-about artists in the region after her auction debut at Phillips London achieved a six-figure result, followed by solo shows at White Cube in Paris and Albion Jeune in London.

Her paintings are abstract, large-scale, and rooted in Saudi landscape — Riyadh's desert light, the patterns of Bedouin weaving, the lines of Arabic calligraphy, the city's grid. Red and warm tones recur throughout her canvases, drawn from the environment that surrounds her.

"Texture, line, and the movement of paint are used in an attempt to capture elements of the Saudi landscape as a whole," she says. "The traditional Arab Bedouin dress is filled with colour. As are the tents. Women here have traditionally embellished their gowns. Where does this sense of vibrant creativity come from?"

For Ahmad, colour has become something independent — not chosen from a reference, but arrived at through process. She lays her paints out and gets to work. What comes out is a record of memory, place, and the complex energy of a country in transformation.

Sarine Semerjian describes her own journey as a hamster on a wheel: moments of fully lived life, interrupted by war, then rebuilding, then repeating. She is self-taught in painting, and in the live performance she became known for, dancing and drawing with charcoal in front of an audience.

Her palette has shifted dramatically over the years. Early work was dark and heavy, made during COVID, during destruction, during loss. Now her canvases are bright, almost shockingly so. But the colour doesn't soften the message.

"The colours are bright," she says, "but the message is still very dark. That hasn't disappeared."

In her painting Oléa, red does exactly that — it shows up vivid and alive, but what it describes is something internal, almost biological. "The red clusters look like molecules, like an internal system. The nervous system. Even the closed eye has antenna-like forms. The whole painting feels alive — pumping, moving."

Shaikha Al Mazrou is an Emirati sculptor and professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. She works with industrial materials — fibreglass, steel, resin, copper — pushing them to behave in ways they shouldn't.

Red has become her signature colour. In her 2022 work Red Stack — eight oversized cushions cast in metal and stacked several metres high, shown at Frieze Sculpture in Regent's Park, London — the red both flattens the structure and sharpens it, making the silhouette impossible to ignore against the green of the park. The cushions look like they could slide at any moment. But they, of course, don't.

More recently, for Deliberate Pauses in Hatta's mountains — five enormous red discs placed along a hiking trail in the Hajar range, described as the largest site-specific art intervention in Dubai — the same shade reappears. The discs echo the oxidised iron hues of the surrounding rocks, making the red feel like an amplified version of what is already there.

"I had a lot of questions about why it is in red," she said. For her, the answer was both personal and environmental: red is her signature, but for this work, it also came from the landscape itself. She drew from the colours of the surrounding mountains, wanting the discs to blend into the terrain while still letting the red push through.