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RARARES Gallery — gallery cover
DIFC · Dubai

RARARES Gallery

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Curatorial Ethos

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Rarares Gallery is a commercial art gallery founded in 2024 by artist and curator Marina Baisel, located in Zone C, Gate Avenue, DIFC. Occupying a 100-square-metre space formerly home to Boccara Gallery, Rarares presents contemporary art that challenges perception across painting, sculpture, installation, digital media and textiles. The programme mixes emerging and established international artists — among them sculptor Mederic Turay, Emirati artist Fatma Lootah, glass sculptor Maria Bang Espersen and digital artist WHYIXD — with a stated commitment to discovering unique talents globally while creating value for regional communities. Since opening, the gallery has participated in Art Central Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi Art Fair, the DIFC Sculpture Park and Art Dubai. The name derives from the Latin rarus, meaning rarity.

Why this gallery matters

Exhibo editorial

Exhibo editorial

Marina Baisel is both the founder and one of the artists. That's an unusual position for a gallerist — she shows her own work alongside the programme she curates, and the gallery is explicitly built around her vision of what art should do: inspire people to do good, motivate them toward greater accomplishments, foster a sense of purpose. The motto is "Art Globally, Act Locally." The name comes from the Latin rarus — rarity, uniqueness. Rarares opened in 2024 in Gate Avenue DIFC, in the space formerly occupied by Boccara Gallery. In under two years it has participated in Art Central Hong Kong twice, Abu Dhabi Art Fair, the DIFC Sculpture Park, and Art Dubai 2026. The programme moves between established and emerging artists — Mederic Turay's figurative bronzes, Fatma Lootah's Emirati-rooted practice, the textile works of Amina Illuminati, digital sculpture by WHYIXD — with a consistent interest in work that pushes material and conceptual boundaries simultaneously. For a gallery that opened in 2024, the programme is ambitious and the footprint is already international.

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Address

Gate Avenue, Zone C, DIFC

Artists & People

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Artists

Represented and guest artists exhibiting with the gallery.

Fatma Lootah

Fatma Lootah

Represented Artist

Fatma Lootah was born and raised in Dubai, studied at the Art Academy of Baghdad, and moved to Washington D.C. in 1979 to continue her education. Since 1984 she has lived in Verona, Italy — but her heart, as she has put it herself, is still in the Emirates. She has been saying this for forty years and showing up to prove it. Her practice moved from performance art to large-scale abstract painting and installation, and has stayed there: emotionally charged, poetic, rooted in questions of identity, womanhood and cultural memory. The palette is vibrant, the scale generous, the work unmistakably hers. She participated in the Sharjah Biennial in 1993, when few Emirati artists were being shown in that kind of context. Her first solo exhibition in Dubai came in 2009 — Desert and The People of the Reddish Dune — and opened a chapter that has continued with multiple exhibitions a year ever since. In 2010, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum visited one of her solo shows and was moved enough by what he saw to gift her House 35 in the Al Fahidi Historical Neighbourhood — a studio in the oldest surviving district of the city where she had grown up. She works there when she returns to Dubai. Her work has been shown in Times Square as part of the Nasdaq Artist in Residence programme, exhibited across Italy, France, Austria, Morocco and the United States, and covered in Vogue Arabia, Marie Claire Arabia and The National. She shuns the title of cultural ambassador but functions as one anyway.

Partners

Institutional partners, collaborators, and allied organisations.

Marina Baisel

Marina Baisel

Partner

Marina Baisel came to gallery-making from two directions simultaneously: interior design and her own art practice. Both inform how she thinks about space — not as a neutral container for objects, but as something that changes with every exhibition, that creates its own narrative and atmosphere. When she opened Rarares in 2024 in Gate Avenue DIFC, she was explicit about what she wanted: a space positioned between commercially driven blue-chip galleries and smaller regional ones, bringing international and emerging artists into dialogue without forcing them into either category. She is also one of the artists the gallery shows. Her own practice works with functional sculpture — everyday objects transformed to explore how familiar forms lose and regain meaning as humanity's relationship with the environment shifts. Her recent work reflects on the erasure of primal imagery in the pursuit of an infinite future. She has shown at Cosmoscow, the Collect Art Fair at Somerset House in London, Maison&Objet in Paris, Art Central Hong Kong and the DIFC Sculpture Park. Running a gallery and maintaining an active practice at the same time is an unusual position. Baisel has built Rarares around the idea that art should inspire people to do good — which is either a mission statement or a curatorial instinct, and in her case appears to be both.