Palestinian-American artist Sabri Sundos brings flowers, dance, and memory into focus in his solo exhibition Chasing Flowers at Fisk Gallery in Portland, Oregon. The show uses blooming forms and rhythmic figures to explore freedom, longing, and diasporic identity through a distinctly contemporary visual language.
Sundos' path to painting began only in 2018, after years spent making music and performing. What started with an album-cover project opened a new creative direction, giving him a medium where intuition could move directly from thought to canvas. That shift now shapes a practice that spans painting, embroidery, drawings, and animation.
His work is divided between two approaches: expressive paintings and carefully planned tatreez-inspired embroidery. The embroidery connects his art to a long Palestinian tradition, while the paintings remain open, playful, and improvisational. Together, they reflect both heritage and experimentation.
A recurring dancing figure appears across the exhibition, inspired by continuous-line studies of Alvin Ailey dancers and gradually made personal through details such as curly hair and a unibrow. The figure is intentionally open-ended, allowing viewers to see different identities and emotions within it. For Sundos, movement represents autonomy, imagination, and the freedom to keep becoming.
Flowers are the exhibition's central motif. Painted in colors that echo the Palestinian flag, they shift beyond decoration and become symbols of beauty, memory, and belonging. The result is a body of work that balances joy with reflection, while keeping hope at its core. In that sense, Sundos presents art as a living bridge between tradition, self-expression, and collective imagination.
As artists continue to merge heritage with new media, practices like Sundos' suggest a future where cultural memory and contemporary creativity move forward together.
