Rasha Omar

born 1989 in Damascus, Syria.

Broken glass, a torn passport, a child's drawing: Rasha Omar's work begins in what Damascus left behind. The shards are how she remembers the city, where she was born and lived until the Syrian war forced her to leave. Of Kurdish-Palestinian descent and based in Vienna, Omar belongs to a generation of artists rebuilding visual languages after displacement. On her canvases, portrait and bird's-eye landscape share a single plane: figures rise from layered grounds, while gardens seen from above interlock into topographies that read as both map and dream. Memory, here, is not represented but mapped — the conventions of garden and aerial view doing what portraiture alone cannot, drawing on origin myths long held in common across Western Asia, Dilmun among them.

"From wars and gardens to… all-over abstraction.” – Tenzing Barshee

Her work has been exhibited at the Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund; City SALTS, Basel; Nova Contemporary, Bangkok; High Art, Seoul; the Khan Asa'ad Pasha, Damascus; and the Shander Gallery, Erbil.

In 2023, her first solo exhibition with Jan Kaps, Dilmun, opened in Cologne. In 2024, Omar's work was the subject of the duo exhibition Above a Cloud at City SALTS, Basel. In 2026, her work is included in Die andere Seite der Nacht at the Dortmunder Kunstverein.