Image: Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai
Leila Heller Gallery opens a solo exhibition of the Mumbai-based artist Manish Nai at its Dubai space in Alserkal Avenue on 23 September 2026. Titled ‘In Search of Material Within Material’, the show occupies Gallery 2 and runs until 10 November, with an opening reception on 23 September from 6 to 9 p.m.
Nai, born in 1980 in Gujarat, has lived in Mumbai since he was five, and the gallery traces much of his work to what he has seen and handled in that city. Jute entered his practice through his father’s textile business, where goods arrived wrapped in burlap, and through the same fabric he noticed draped over buildings under construction around Mumbai. Alongside jute he uses newspaper, cardboard, used clothing, mosquito mesh and corrugated metal, cutting, folding, compressing and layering them in processes the gallery describes as slow and repetitive. The earlier uses of these materials are not concealed; their history is treated as part of the finished object.
The works assembled for Dubai give a sense of that range. They include panels of found, rusted corrugated metal sheets mounted on wood, pieces made from used clothes bound to teak, painted aluminium fixed to layers of stainless-steel mesh, acrylic on corrugated aluminium sheets made this year, and large watercolours on paper, the biggest of them more than two metres high.
Nai trained at the L.S. Raheja School of Art in Mumbai. His work has been shown at institutions including the Devi Art Foundation in New Delhi, the Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai, Para Site in Hong Kong, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, NTU CCA in Singapore, Het Noordbrabants Museum in the Netherlands and the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, and he took part in the Shanghai Biennale in 2012 and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2014 and 2018. In 2017 the Fondation Fernet-Branca in Saint-Louis, France, mounted a survey of his paintings, murals, sculptures and photographs. Previous solo presentations have been held with galleries in New York, Paris, St. Moritz, Chicago and Mumbai.
The exhibition opens on the same evening as ‘Azza Al Qubaisi: Between Land and Sea’ in Gallery 1, a mid-career survey of the Emirati multidisciplinary artist curated by Aysha Al Hemeiri and running to the same closing date. Leila Heller, established in New York four decades ago, opened its Dubai gallery in Alserkal Avenue in 2015.
