Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to present Along the way, something changed, an exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Latifa Alajlan (b. 1998, Kuwait City, Kuwait), the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This show marks a significant continuation of Alajlan’s exploration of material, memory, and the shifting boundaries between preservation and loss as she examines Middle Eastern visual idioms, generating her own language and calling hierarchies and systems of structure into question. 

At its core, Along the way, something changed is a meditation on disappearance. “I keep thinking about what’s being lost,” Alajlan reflects. “Historical sites, walls, places that carry memory, disappearing slowly or all at once.”

Alajlan’s process is intuitive and deeply personal; each painting expresses the artist’s sensibility, experience, and feelings in the moment. Drawing on prevalent motifs of Islamic and Middle Eastern architecture, Alajlan establishes a painted ground upon which her own gestural language evolves. 

“My work comes from that language of walls and tiles, but also from how fragile they really are,” Alajlan continues. “I use building materials as paint, not to rebuild anything, just to hold onto something before it’s gone.” Alajlan’s painting inhabits this unstable space as her iconographic rhythm of latticework, stars, and geometric shapes form the basis for her practice. In this newest body of work, the artist applies layers of acrylic, graphite, oil paint, and compound on linen, creating luminous white surfaces that suggest openness and possibility. Alajlan then transmutes these works into denser, more forceful compositions to reflect a tension between softness and weight, capturing a moment where fragility gives way to pressure and erosion yet maintains a sense of potence. 

Latifa Alajlan (b. 1998, Kuwait City, Kuwait) earned an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023, and a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. Alajlan was a 2024 artist-in-residence at Bait Shouaib Art Residency in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Additional solo exhibitions include Galerie Farah Fakhri, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, (2026), and Taymour Grahne Projects, Dubai, UAE, (2025). Latifa Alajlan is represented by Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York.