PRESENTATION:Tamara Al Samerraei-The Bed Is Still Warm

The work of painter Tamara Al Samerraei is often based on photographs from both her personal archive and the public domain. Film stills, digital images and other found, stolen or borrowed visual materials are brought together to extend contemplation of familiar scenes. She depicts indoor and outdoor spaces as well as objects and figures that are stripped of everything except their bare essence.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Marfa’ Projects Gallery Archive

In her solo exhibition “The Bed Is Still Warm” at Marfa’ Projects, Tamara Al Samerraei explores an elusive territory where places do not merely hold memories, but seem to remember us in return. Across her broader artistic practice, Al Samerraei has long hovered around the threshold of human presence and absence, painting quiet, melancholic environments—abandoned interiors, overgrown gardens, lingering shadows, and fragile architectures. Her canvases rarely feature fully articulated figures; instead, they evoke humanity through the traces left behind: a window opening onto a garden, an empty room after someone departs, or a bed that retains the shape of a body.

“The Bed Is Still Warm” gathers works created slowly over time, in fragments and pieces, rather than through a rapid, singular burst of production. The images stem from diverse origins—some captured by the artist’s own camera, others found, old, or repeatedly revisited. What unifies these paintings is not a linear narrative or a shared geography, but a persistent sense of open-endedness. In Al Samerraei’s hands, an abandoned house does not automatically become empty, an unfamiliar setting can enter personal memory through someone else’s photograph, and an old image can reemerge years later to demand a fresh gaze.

The architecture in this body of work is particularly tender and vulnerable. Houses and shelters appear as modest, barely cohesive structures composed of fragmenting walls, sagging roofs, and disappearing doors. They recall the imagined houses of childhood while belonging to no one in particular, functioning as shelters that cannot quite shelter, yet somehow endure. In the title theme of the exhibition, a bed sits at the center of the composition much like a stage after the actors have departed. Within it, a figure dissolves into the bedding—a shoulder losing its boundaries to the pillow, a leg blending into the soft grey of the blanket—while surrounding objects like curtains, windows, and potted plants drift away from their defined edges.

This blurring of boundaries reflects Al Samerraei’s distinctive technical approach. In her general practice, paint is treated as a fluid, living medium that refuses to stay fixed. Diluted washes run down the canvas surface, turning solid walls into delicate lines and shadows into deliberate stains, effectively capturing a moment where forms are dissolving even as the painting attempts to hold them still. Her process is deeply recursive: she often photographs her own completed paintings and paints from those photographs, allowing previous imagery to reenter her work in altered states. Through this cycle, scale shifts, figures mutate into objects, objects begin to resemble bodies, and rooms open onto unexpected adjoining spaces.

The exhibition reflects Al Samerraei’s ongoing inquiry into what remembering does to things over time. Memory in her work is not an archive that preserves images intact, but an active force that reshapes them—enlarging certain details, erasing others, bringing distant elements close, and leaving others far behind. By continually returning to the house, the bed, the body, and the photograph, Al Samerraei captures a state of quiet transformation where every return leaves the subject altered yet familiar, allowing the house to remain standing, the bed to remain warm, and the narrative to stay ongoing.

Photo: Tamara Al Samerraei, Black Book 22 , 2023, Acrylic paint on canvas, 85 x 111 cm, © Tamara Al-Samerraei, Courtesy the artist and Marfa’ Projects Gallery

Info: Marfa’ Projects Gallery, 1339 Marfa’ District, Beirut, Lebanon, Duration: 30/9- , Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-16:00, www.marfaprojects.com/