Muscat,(ONA) - The online art exhibition entitled (Encrypting Landscapes) was inaugurated this evening at Bait Al Zubair Museum in the Wilayat of Muscat by South African artist Davina de Pierre in cooperation with Sarah Gallery of Fine Arts in Muscat.

Laila bint Muhammad Al-Najjar, Director of Sarah Gallery of Fine Arts, says that the exhibition includes 30 plastic artworks and two Assemblage works, in one of which the artist used the video to highlight her main theme in the emergence of technology, as her artworks embody the immersion of people with telephones, a scene that is very common these days and she called it the new mode of portraiture. This is the second personal art exhibition for this artist in the Sultanate after her exhibition, which was hosted by Sarah's Gallery in 2011 and included 76 artworks.

Laila Al-Najjar added that most of the artist's works represent the landscapes of the Sultanate, most notably the Dhofar Mountains in the kharif season, Al Jabal Al Akhdhar and Jabal Shams, in addition to a number of historical and cultural landscapes in the Sultanate. The artist is influenced by the romantic art movement using the oil colours on the canvas which she brings from the local markets with repeating stylistic elements or motifs.

The exhibition contains drawings of landscapes from the Dhofar Mountains and the Omani mountain regions such as Jebel Shams and Jabal Al Akhdar, which she drew on a stylized canvas in oil colours. She found in the Omani environment an inspiring space that could be applied to her research in - sublime painting, such as works of art in the romantic artistic movement in the eighteenth century.

The artist highlighted the experiment with concepts of romantic frescoes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that test nature as being largely beautiful but also terrifying on screens that act as portals into cyberspace.