Hani Alqam: A Painter of Urban Memory and Human Complexity
Born in Amman in 1977, Hani Alqam has long been a careful observer of the social and psychological undercurrents that shape his native city. Trained at the Institute of Fine Arts in Amman (Diploma, 2001), he further honed his practice through studies in painting and printmaking at Darat al-Funun’s Summer Academy and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts.
Over the past two decades, Alqam has emerged as a distinctive voice in contemporary Arab painting, with five solo exhibitions and participation in numerous group shows across Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Pakistan, and Jordan. His work often meditates on the fragility of the human psyche and the layered realities of everyday life, rendering scenes that are both psychologically charged and rooted in place.
Amman—its crumbling façades, old cafés, and densely woven neighborhoods—features prominently in his canvases. Yet these cityscapes are not mere documentary; they are emotive terrains through which Alqam explores identity, alienation, memory, and the subtle rituals of urban survival. His figures, often rendered in thick, expressive brushstrokes, walk the line between vulnerability and defiance—both universal in their resonance and deeply personal in their rendering.
“As an expressionist painter,” Alqam notes, “I use my brush to portray the society around me—the human and his movements, the person’s memory. Ordinary faces provoke me. They instigate unknown things, drawing me in, allowing me to imagine the world through their eyes.”
His gestural technique—marked by dense, textured applications of paint—is not simply an aesthetic choice but a philosophy. “The thickness,” he says, “is a compilation of thoughts and desires unraveled. It lets me physically touch a piece of society—a society I represent through fragile, daring figures who are at once intricate, familiar, and chaotic.”
Hani Alqam continues to live and work in Amman, where the city itself remains both his subject and his studio—a landscape of endless nuance, contradiction, and inspiration.