Anuar Khalifi: Remember the Future

Remember the Future is the third solo exhibition by Spanish-Moroccan artist Anuar Khalifi at the gallery. Bringing together a new body of large-scale paintings and works on paper, the exhibition constructs the complexities of the contemporary moment. The works move between reality and imagination and across different tenses in time, inviting viewers to partake in meaning-making with curiosity and childlike wonder. Marking an evolution in Khalifi’s practice, the works feature increasingly intricate and carefully composed settings expanding the pictorial field.

Shaped by Khalifi’s sustained engagement with magical realism, art history, and poetry, the works in Remember the Future position painting as a space untethered from fixed boundaries; some paintings originate from scenes the artist has witnessed, while others are born from internal reflection. Rather than treating reality as something fixed or outside the self, Khalifi approaches it as mutable and participatory, formed through bodily presence and imagination. Replete with recurring symbols—such as chairs, vessels, and flora—his painterly surfaces invite associative readings that privilege intuition and attentiveness.

Remember the Future (2025), for instance, depicts a man standing against a vibrant pink wall in a space that hovers between interior and exterior, holding a length of white shroud stretched gently between his hands. Framed by bold planes of color and a checkered ground, the figure appears caught in a moment that feels both staged and intimate. The scene unfolds with a quiet strangeness, where the gesture feels at once ceremonial and ordinary, inviting the viewer to linger in its openness.

Works on paper introduce imaginary figures that emerged with ease, reinforcing Khalifi’s trust in intuition and chance as integral to his process. Across the exhibition, the artist resists readings solely tied to identity or geography, instead foregrounding universal concerns such as time, life, death, intimacy, spirituality, and the immediacy of lived experience. Painting becomes a site of creative storytelling, where play and freedom are reclaimed, and images feel unmistakably of the present.