Rosalind Nashashibi’s Gaza Apollo at GRIMM London
In 2013, a Palestinian fisherman named Jawdat Abu Ghurab was casting his nets off the coast of Gaza. After coming up empty-handed all afternoon, he spotted an arm reaching out from the seabed. Frightened at first, he soon realised it wasn’t a human body but rather a statue. With the help of relatives and many hours of diving, they were able to retrieve the 6-foot-tall artefact.
Historically, the Gaza Strip was a crucial international hub for ancient trade routes. Subsequently, many antiquities such as Greek coins and Byzantine mosaics have been uncovered by archaeologists. Unsure of when the statue was made and of what material, Ghurab cut off one of its fingers for testing. It’s an Ancient Greek bronze statue of Apollo, the god of music, prophecy, healing and light. The statue was put on eBay to be sold for $500,000, but quickly the eBay listing disappeared, and the statue was seized by Gaza authorities. The bronze Gaza Apollo’s current whereabouts are unknown to the public.
All the existing images of the statue were taken in the same room with a mattress clad in Smurf-printed bedsheets. Rosalind Nashashibi’s Gaza Apollo solo exhibition at GRIMM gallery in London depicts the deity and its unexpected journey. It is her first solo exhibition in London since her presentation at the National Gallery in 2020. She was the first woman to win the Beck’s Futures prize and a few years later represented Scotland in the 52nd Venice Biennale.
The opening of Gaza Apollo at GRIMM coincided with Frieze Week. A week overwhelmed with art and noise, the curators at GRIMM give each of Nashashibi’spaintings space to breathe on their walls. Upon entering the gallery, I immediately come face to face with the oxidised statue. Perhaps it’s my American upbringing, but I can’t help but compare the image of the statue in Head of Gaza Apollo (2026) to my very own Statue of Liberty. The teal shade is bright and familiar, layered on top of bronze coloured paint and textured in a way that adds a weathered physicality to the canvas.
Nashashibi regards the statue as a divine gift from the sea to the Palestinian people—a community in need of transcendent protection and healing. In Apollo of Gaza (2026) and Gaza Apollo With His Title (2026), the statue is lying on its back. The paintings are reproductions of the famous yet limited pictures we have of the statue. Papa Smurf populates the bedsheets the deity rests upon, with human hands in the corner of the canvases. In fact, in every painting of the deity, hands appear on or reaching towards the statue. By depicting the lacuna of the statue’s missing finger, her paintings become a testament to our propensity to fracture the sacred out of curiosity and greed.
Her colour palette is bright, yet washed with softness as if Nashashibi used watercolours. A seafoam and peach human-like figure lounges back reading on top of a blur of grids and Monet-esque lily pads in Nothingness Suits Me (2026). It’s whimsical and redolent of the way time passes without fanfare on a late-July afternoon.
Downstairs, the exhibition thematically departs from the bronze deity. The painted hues shift as well, into darker and more saturated colours. A tablescape is quite literally overshadowed by an entangled couple, the figures embrace each other in a way that is both tender and violent in Rats of Venice (2026). Four women pull a blanket taut to catch a man who is mid-air in And Then We Played (2026). In the background of the painting, a lone horse grazes in the field as a burnt-orange sun is about to set on the horizon. The exhibition’s press release reads, “These dives into historical painting are part of a continuous conversation between history and our actions today, and they are not separated from the task of evoking the materiality of the present world, without closing our eyes to the crimes and oppressions that haunt it.”
In the West, a majority of headlines and stories about Gaza in recent history have centred on devastation and horror. And while that is necessary, Nashashibi’s exhibition reminds us all of Gaza’s long and rich history of beauty and the role it played in globalisation. As the burnt-orange sun continues to rise and set, there has been and will continue to be play.
The exhibition is on from October 13 to November 21st at GRIMM London.
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