EXHIBITION CATALOGUE 2025-2026

Meet the Artist

Hassan Niyaz

Meet the Artist

Hasan Niyaz (b. 1991) is Maldivian self-taught artist whose work navigates the spaces between solitude, memory, and imagination. Hasan built his practice through curiosity, persistence, and a love for storytelling in all its forms. His background as a graphic designer gives his paintings and visual explorations a striking sense of composition, color, and rhythm, while his lifelong fascination with movies fuels the cinematic atmosphere often present in his work. Hasan’s art is shaped by personal experience—quiet reflections, shifting moods, and the desire to translate fleeting inner moments into something tangible and universal. His approach resists boundaries, moving freely between oil, acrylics, and mixed media, yet always anchored by a search for authenticity and emotional resonance. Both as an artist and designer, Hasan sees creativity as a form of dialogue: with the self, with others, and with time itself. His works have been exhibited in solo and group shows, resonating with audiences for their honesty and raw beauty. For Hasan, art is not just about producing images but about creating moments of connection; the same way a great film or design leaves a lasting impression long after it’s seen.

Five Movements

These paintings are inspired by the Maldivian saying that a heron’s flight is an omen that precedes the rain. The bird is a messenger of change, tying together earth, water, and transformation. The works do not depict the heron in detail, but instead use minimal colour, form, and gesture to create a space between image and suggestion. The heron appears as a rhythm—part presence, part absence—against fields of shifting green or orange light. The marks surrounding it suggest rain, air, and movement, evoking a sense of what comes before and after. The five paintings are a meditation on island time, which is measured not in hours, but in signs: the pause before rain, the flight of wings, and the scent of water. The work is about evoking, not describing, and is a quiet trace of time’s movement. To foster deeper immersion in these stories, a small zine containing poems and anecdotes is placed in the Villa, inviting pause, reflection, and the quiet art of reading.

“The heron flies. The rain comes. And time, always moving, leaves its quiet trace behind”