Mestaria: The Alserkal Gallery That Understands the Frame Is Part of the Work

ALSERKAL AVENUE · DUBAI

Reading time: 7 min

The frame is usually an afterthought, handled by somebody else. Mestaria keeps a framing workshop in the building with more than 300 styles and museum-grade options, and that single fact explains almost everything about how the place works.

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There is a design discipline in the art world that nobody writes about, and it is the one that decides how the work actually looks on your wall.

Framing determines proportion, depth, colour temperature, how much air a picture is given, whether it advances or recedes, whether glass reflects the room back at you, and whether the paper survives the next thirty years. Get it wrong and a good work looks cheap. Get it right and a modest work holds a wall. It is a genuine design skill with a genuine craft behind it, and it is one of the few decisions in the whole process that a buyer then lives with every day.

Mestaria Gallery, at Unit 35, Alserkal Avenue, in Al Quoz 1, does not treat it that way. Alongside a programme of contemporary work with a focus on artists of Arabic, African and Asian origin, it runs an in-house framing operation offering more than 300 frame styles, bespoke from design through production, in standard and museum-quality materials, plus a consultancy that will follow a work from selection through to installation on the wall.

That is an unusual thing for a gallery to build, and it is the key to reading the whole place.

The frame is a design decision, not a finishing touch

Consider what a framer actually decides.

The mount width sets how much visual silence a work is given before the eye hits an edge, and it changes the perceived scale of the image more than the frame profile does. The profile depth determines whether the work sits proud of the wall or recedes into it. The finish either agrees with the work’s palette or deliberately argues with it. The glazing is a genuine technical choice, since museum glass costs several times more than standard and removes almost all reflection while blocking ultraviolet, which is the thing that will fade a work on paper in a bright Gulf apartment.

Every one of those is a design decision with a visible consequence, and most buyers make all of them in about four minutes at a counter while thinking about something else.

Offering 300 styles is not really about choice. Anyone confronted with 300 options needs guidance more than range, which is precisely why the model only works with consultants attached to it. What the number signals is that the decision is being treated as one worth spending time on.

“Non-intimidating” is a spatial claim

Mestaria describes itself as contemporary, affordable and non-intimidating, and that is a more precise claim than it first appears, because intimidation in a gallery is produced almost entirely by design.

The conventional contemporary gallery is a set of deliberate signals: an unmarked door, a vast under-furnished room, a receptionist positioned to be approached rather than to approach, no prices anywhere, and a silence that makes any question feel like an admission. None of that is accidental. It is a filtering mechanism, and it works, which is the point.

A gallery that sets out to be non-intimidating is choosing to dismantle those signals, and the framing counter is the most effective tool available for doing it. A workshop in the building changes the social script of the room. It gives a visitor an ordinary practical reason to be there and something concrete to talk about, and it moves the conversation from taste, where people fear being caught out, to specification, where they do not.

The intent is coherent, and it is a design intent rather than a tonal one, which is what makes the place worth walking into rather than simply reading about.

What is on the walls

The gallery represents around 18 artists, and the roster carries real weight alongside the accessible positioning.

Wissam Shawkat is the most significant name on it. The Iraqi-born, Dubai-based calligrapher trained in the classical Arabic scripts to a very high level and then broke from them, developing what he calls Calligraforms, in which letterforms are treated as pure composition rather than as carriers of legible text. That is a designer’s move as much as an artist’s, since it is fundamentally about the behaviour of a letter as a shape, and it puts a serious type practice on the walls of a gallery that also sells you the frame.

Dominic Benhura brings the African strand its weight. The Zimbabwean sculptor is among the best known practitioners of Shona stone sculpture, working serpentine and springstone into rounded, highly finished figurative forms. Shona sculpture is a genuine international movement with a material logic of its own, and it is not widely shown in the Gulf, which makes its presence here worth noting rather than listing.

Alongside them sit Areej Rajab, Tawanda Makore, Simon Back, Sandhya Sethu and The Connor Brothers, the last being a commercially successful British duo with a wide following.

The stated focus on Arabic, African and Asian makers is the part worth dwelling on. Dubai’s gallery scene is strong on the Middle East and on the Iranian diaspora, and Africa and South Asia are both enormously represented in the city’s population. A programme built deliberately across all three speaks directly to the city as it actually is.

Older than the district it sits in

One chronological detail reframes the gallery, and it is in none of the coverage.

Mestaria was first established as a gallery space in the UAE in the 1990s, and it appears to have operated previously under the name Showcase. Alserkal Avenue only began attracting galleries into its warehouses in the late 2000s.

So Mestaria did not emerge from Al Quoz. It predates Al Quoz as an arts district by a decade or more, and moved in once the district existed. That is a different kind of history from the one usually told about Alserkal, which tends to run as though the galleries and the district appeared together.

It also explains the framing business. A gallery that has been selling art in this city since the 1990s has watched a generation of buyers make their first purchase, and it has learned what happens next, which is that somebody has to hang the thing.

Why Alserkal needs both ends of the market

There is a wider point here about what makes a gallery district work.

A few units away, Leila Heller operates a purpose-designed space of roughly 2,500 square metres, showing artists of genuine international standing at a scale that reads as institutional. That end of the market is what gives a district its critical reputation and draws international attention.

It is not, however, where most people buy their first piece of art.

A district that only has the museum-scale end produces visitors. A district that also has galleries willing to talk about frames, prices and how to hang something produces collectors, and collectors are what sustain the first kind over time. Alserkal’s density, the highest concentration of galleries in the region, only works as an ecosystem if it spans both.

Mestaria occupies the end that gets written about least and probably converts most.

Visiting

Mestaria is at Unit 35, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz 1, open daily, with hours generally running from 10:00 to 19:00, though it is worth checking before travelling.

Treat it as part of an Alserkal visit rather than a destination on its own. The compound holds more than 60 creative spaces and around 25 galleries, so the sensible approach is a half day covering several, and Mestaria works well late in that sequence, once you have seen a good deal and want to talk to somebody about what any of it costs.

If you are considering buying, the framing conversation is the one to have. Ask about museum glass specifically. In a city of bright apartments and a great deal of glazing, ultraviolet is the thing that will quietly destroy a work on paper, and it is the single most useful piece of advice a framer can give you.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The art world is very good at writing about the moment a work is made and almost silent on the moment it is bought, framed and hung. That second moment is where the design decisions with the longest consequences get made, and where most people are least equipped to make them.

A gallery that puts a framing workshop in the building has decided that this part matters. It is a quieter position than the one taken by the big spaces down the road, and both are needed. Mestaria’s is the one most first-time buyers will feel the benefit of.

The best argument for Mestaria is not on the wall text. It is that somebody there will tell you what mount width to use and why you should pay more for the glass.