Fatma Lootah

Fatma Lootah is an Emirati artist whose biography spans continents and decades, shaped by a formation that moved from her native Dubai through the Art Academy of Baghdad and onward to art studies in Washington, D.C. Since the 1980s she has made her home in Verona, Italy, while maintaining a studio in Dubai's Al Fahidi Historical Neighbourhood — a base that keeps her practice rooted in the cultural landscape of the UAE even as her perspective remains distinctly international.

Lootah's work engages deeply with questions of memory, belonging, and natural heritage, most fully articulated in her Ghaf Tree series of 2019. Through painting, she returns repeatedly to the ghaf tree — an emblem of resilience and Emirati identity — as a vehicle for exploring the relationship between landscape, cultural symbolism, and personal history. The series stands as a sustained meditation on what it means to belong to a place, rendered through a visual language that draws on both her Gulf origins and her long years of living abroad. Her work is held in the collection of Al Shindagha Museum in Dubai, situating her practice within the institutional memory of the city.

In 2018, Lootah participated in the Nasdaq Artist in Residence programme in New York, with her work presented in Times Square — an exposure that brought her painting into one of the world's most public arenas. Her exhibition record reflects an active presence across the Gulf's contemporary art landscape: she has shown with RARARES Gallery, her primary representative in Dubai, including the group presentation Breathing Earth at Art Dubai and the solo exhibition Under the Ghaf Tree: Where Everything Belongs in 2026. Further 2026 appearances include the group exhibition Reimagined at Artbooth Gallery in Abu Dhabi and The Field of Dreams at Zawyeh Gallery in Dubai. She has also presented work in a solo context for an Emirati Women's Day exhibition at ME by Meliá Dubai, in association with Art in the Middle — an occasion that underscored the cultural dimensions her practice consistently addresses.