Aya Tarek's inaugural solo exhibition in Alexandria — fifteen new paintings installed across SHELTER Art Space's sprawling interior, walls saturated in royal blue, lit by spotlights. The first time the work came home at scale, after a decade of walls in Geneva, São Paulo, Tampa, Cairo, and Cologne.

The fifteen paintings share a palette — saturated primaries, occasional earth tones against dark grounds — but not a single style. Some works draw on the graphic economy of early-1980s illustration: the sharp contours and flat colour zones of Patrick Nagel's New Wave imagery, or the bold androgyny Jean-Paul Goude constructed with Grace Jones — translated into a looser, more unstable register. Others move toward the structural openness of Matisse or the open field of abstraction. The subjects shift registers without announcing transitions: a tightly framed portrait, a figure in a power suit, a car suspended mid-air, an interior of large houseplants and an empty seat with the feeling that something has just happened in the room.

The title names a specific anxiety — the compulsive comparison, accelerated by social media, between the life being lived and the life being missed. The blue walls, the spotlit canvases, the certificates of authenticity exhibited as works alongside the paintings: all of it implicates the viewer in the same economy of desire the paintings examine. The show was conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic — a period when the gap between what was happening and what was being documented had never been wider, or more closely watched.