Blue comes with quite a lot of baggage. It is expected to calm us down, remind us of the sea or announce that somebody is sad. Artists, thankfully, are under no obligation to use it so neatly.

In the works of Shirazeh Houshiary, Mehdi Moutashar, Suad Al-Attar, Lulwah Al Homoud and Seroj Barseghian, blue never performs exactly the same task twice. It can make breath visible, construct a space, preserve the memory of a city, mark the movement of the planet or give sorrow its own rhythm.

None of these artists treats colour as a final layer added once the important decisions have been made. Blue is one of those decisions. It determines how the work moves, what it remembers and how long it asks us to keep looking.

Shirazeh Houshiary has spent much of her career trying to give form to things that cannot easily be seen: breath, perception, transformation and the constant movement between presence and disappearance.

In Swerve from 2023, an intense blue form appears to move across a black surface, surrounded by thin passages of white pigment. It could be smoke, a wave, a storm system or something happening much further away in space. Look closer, however, and the surface reveals an intricate network of pencil marks.

Houshiary creates these paintings with the canvas laid flat on the studio floor. She pours water mixed with pigment across it, then builds repeated inscriptions over the sediments left behind. Her paintings are based on two superimposed words, written again and again until language begins to dissolve into texture. The process requires both physical movement and intense concentration, bringing the body, mind and surface together.

The blue in Swerve can suggest air, water or a distant cosmological landscape, but Houshiary does not reduce it to a single image. Instead, the colour becomes part of her wider attempt to visualise breath — something essential to life but normally impossible to see.

For French-Iraqi artist Mehdi Moutashar, blue is much less atmospheric. It behaves almost like wood, steel or elastic: another material with which space can be constructed.

His large-scale work Trois Angles à 135°, also known as The Spider, is formed from numerous wooden blocks arranged along three broken lines that spread in six directions. Small sections of blue interrupt the natural colour of the wood, while the structure appears to rotate, stretch and reorganise itself across the floor.

Those blue accents refer to the architectural traditions of Mesopotamia, where ultramarine glaze was used to highlight mud-brick surfaces. Yet the reference never turns the work into a historical reconstruction. Moutashar combines it with geometric abstraction, optical movement and a system of angles precise enough to make the composition feel carefully calculated but never static.

He has said that he uses blue “as a medium and not a colour”. That distinction explains much of its role in his practice. Blue is not there to establish a mood. It directs the eye, separates one element from another and makes the empty spaces around the structure part of the work.

Suad Al-Attar’s cities feel as though they belong to several places at once: Baghdad, a half-remembered dream and a story that has been told so many times that reality and mythology have begun to overlap.

The Iraqi artist has repeatedly painted surreal landscapes populated by layered architecture, mythical figures, palm trees, horses and symbols drawn from poetry and Mesopotamian visual culture. Her works often use a largely monochromatic palette, allowing figures and buildings to emerge gradually from the surrounding colour.

In Sunset on Salam City (2004), blue spreads across almost the entire composition, turning the city into something closer to a vision than a mapped place. Its architecture emerges from a dreamlike atmosphere shaped by memory and imagination rather than geographical precision.

Al-Attar has lived in London since 1976, while memories of Iraq have remained central to her visual language. Mathaf notes that her recurring symbols grew partly from childhood memories: gold recalls the domes of the city, a fish refers to the Tigris, and a rooster evokes life in Baghdad. These motifs turn her landscapes into deeply personal spaces of remembrance.

Lulwah Al Homoud’s The Infinite Blue from 2021 does not ask the viewer to stand in front of a blue artwork. It invites them to enter one.

Created for Noor Riyadh, the immersive installation surrounds visitors with a dark-blue projected environment and animated images based on Al Homoud’s long-running series The Language of Existence. Her wider practice begins with Arabic script, which she deconstructs and reorganises through geometric and mathematical systems until letters become part of a new abstract language.

The particular blue used in the installation is connected to changes in the sky around sunrise and sunset prayer times. For Al Homoud, it signals that the Earth is turning to face the sun again. Blue therefore becomes evidence of movement on a scale far larger than the human body, even though we experience it through the very familiar act of watching the sky change.

Seroj Barseghian’s Blue Sonata begins with stripes. They bend, overlap and move across the paintings in long waves, creating a rhythm that feels surprisingly close to sound.

The Iranian-Armenian artist has studied colour, waves and their physical properties since the early 2000s. He considers the strip to be a basic artistic element in its own right, alongside line, shape, texture and space. In Blue Sonata, those strips form fluid compositions influenced by Nastaliq calligraphy and Iranian miniature painting.

Presented in Tehran in 2023, the series explored vibration and movement through predominantly blue paintings. The exhibition connected its palette to sorrow and to the cultural significance of grief within Iran’s Armenian community. Yet the works do not illustrate a specific event or offer a recognisable narrative. Emotion is carried through repetition, direction and tempo instead.

The title Blue Sonata is therefore more than a poetic comparison. Barseghian treats the painted line almost like a sound wave, giving music an objective form. Individual brushstrokes work together like notes: some rise, some fall and others seem to continue beyond the edge of the canvas.