Art Basel 2026 : Majd Abdel Hamid "Compositions"

In the past year, Majd Abdel Hamid has worked on a series of Compositions; they are colorful, painfully slow, improvised embroideries that resist the main qualifiers of cross-stitch: codified, culturally representative, and pre-planned.

The rather site-specific relational aesthetic ecosystem of embroidery gives it relative autonomy and a critical edge. It resists how individuals are taught to see, unlike painting, drawing, and sculpture, in which the spectator is expected to be a man. Embroidery does not cater to this, refreshingly offering a small margin of freedom.

In 2015, Abdel Hamid tried to commission a woman to create a white-on-white embroidery; she refused, saying, “Son, this is a waste of time.” He ended up doing that first embroidery himself and hasn’t stopped since. Stitching repetitively to fill the space of the white fabric with white thread, a performance of transcribing time, transcribing a spectrum of intensities.

The act of embroidery has become a daily habit, providing him with a space to process, and a practice of abstraction emerging not from a withdrawal from the world but from a desire to endure it. Through repetition and material inscription, abstract forms transform experience into texture.

The artist has expanded into Compositions of colors. Submerged into an endless flow of immaterial, flashing images, the artist slows down. He deconstructs the image into pixels and challenges its materiality. His Compositions then become sensorial, personal, and an intimate non-image of colorful tactile pixels woven together. This process allows for a release, a release of intensity as urgency and a necessity for the continuum of practice.