"The Lost Paintings: A Prelude to Return"

OPENING RECEPTION  |  15th April 2026 18:00 - 20:00 | RSVP

The Lost Paintings: a Prelude to Return brings the forefront of contemporary Palestinian art to the P21 Gallery in London. After a successful tour in Montreal, Boston and Belfast, we are honoured to display the work of 53 artists from Palestine and the diaspora in London, and offer compelling programming around it. Tracing the memory of paintings lost to the Nakba, the exhibition examines loss and destruction on one hand, and the power of imagination and art in shaping new futures on the other.

The Lost Paintings artists come together across generations and borders to reimagine the missing works of Maroun Tomb, a Palestinian-Lebanese artist, and his 1947 exhibition in Haifa, that was lost amid the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the Nakba. Drawing on the minimal surviving information of Tomb's last exhibition in Palestine before his forced exile, the contemporary artists’ responses navigate across painting, photography, multi-media, sculpture and video to move between what was, what is and what could be. They do not reconstruct the past, but reclaim it through fragments, gestures, and stories passed across generations.

From Haifa to Gaza, landscapes are revisited not as backgrounds, but as living witnesses; still life is rendered unstable, objects and places teetering between presence and disappearance. Through exploration of colonial violence and its consequences on multiple generations, the exhibition creates a space where memory becomes collective resistance and an act of return, not to what was, but to what still calls. 

“We are very excited to bring The Lost Paintings to London after successful exhibitions in Montreal, Boston and Belfast. The artists featured in this project use various mediums to uniquely express and narrate their stories in connection to the 1948 Nakba. As such, it is a great opportunity for the audience to get a first hand encounter and learn about the turbulent history of Palestine through these rich and versatile perspectives.”

             Rula Khoury, lead curator.