Amar Al-Robeai’s first dream was to be a painter, however it was not until later in life he could fully realize it. After graduating from a university architecture program in 2003, he had a career as an architect for 5 years between Iraq and Dubai. He returned home to Iraq, only to flee as a refugee of the war to Ukraine in 2008.

After residing in east Ukraine and dealing with the turmoils of war and uprooting his life, he changed his creative path from architecture to illustration. Al-Robeai began his career as an illustrator, and was subsequently uprooted again to the west of Ukraine in 2014 due to Russian occupation. Al-Robeai carried on working as an illustrator, but the urge to become a fine artist kept growing.

Al-Robeai began experimenting on how to translate feelings and ideas onto the canvas, creating a certain artistic language and style that took him years to master. In 2023, he fled Ukraine following the start of the Ukraine-Russia war. He landed in the United States, restarting his life for the third time.

During this period of constant and chronological severe changes, Al-Robeai began looking inward and practicing radical gratuity. He observed a connection, a through-line between people of all societies and backgrounds, with similar, if not the same emotions and ideas that connect us all. Through his work, he began visually dissecting the idea of humanity having a stark similarity to the complexities and connections of nature itself.

Al-Robeai’s history as both architect and illustrator afforded him an extensive visual library of natural, abstract and subconscious vocabularies. His specific creative lexicon aided him in magnifying, blending and using his ideas mentioned to represent different feelings and ideas on canvas.

His philosophy is that humans are subconsciously inclined to head towards complexity, and therefore, nature due to it’s inherent complexity. Al-Robeai provides a small anecdote such as the emotion provided to an individual when looking at a big tree. To sincerely observe and witness it with all its branches, leaves and it's endless textures. A connective experience in this moment ties us all as people, that in witnessing the tree, there is a silent voice from the back of one’s mind, saying simply- "Home".

"My goal is to create art that won't be represented as simply part of an interior design, but stands as an individual entity with a sophisticated character that affects its surroundings. A door to a certain emotion or trait that evokes a reaction from the beholder for the longest period of time, and keeps evolving, hence commands our attention every time we pass by. "

-Amar Al-Robeai

 @amaralrobeai