Abu Dhabi · 05/06/2025
Gilbert Halaby SONNET V
the exhibition’s title hints, there are new homages at play in Halaby’s visiting of familiarthemes. Shakespeare’s famous poem laments with aching pathos the passing of time through thechanging of the seasons. A metaphor for the inexorable fading of youth and the perennial urgeto immortalise it in new generations, it is a masterpiece of expression which for Halaby resonatesdeeply with his own artistic intent. “Shakespeare may or may not have realised that his words were his ‘children’; and that everything he wrote—his own body of work—is the undying summer he left us,” says Halaby. “I would like to believe that the summer I will leave behind is my art.”
