About
Minhal Al Halabi
Date of Birth: 1971, Golan Heights / Nationality: New Zealand / Disciplines: Sculpture, Painting, Murals
Minhal Al Halabi is a contemporary visual artist who lives and works in New Zealand. His artistic practice is marked by richness and diversity, encompassing sculpture, painting, and large-scale murals. His work reflects a visual language that explores themes such as memory, dreams, and nature. Al Halabi moves fluidly between realism, surrealism, and abstraction, weaving a unique visual style that blends reality with imagined worlds, offering viewers a contemplative and multilayered experience.
Early Life and Education
Born in 1971 in the Golan Heights, Al Halabi grew up in an environment charged with questions of identity, history, and belonging—elements that deeply shaped his early artistic consciousness. He later studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kyiv, Ukraine, where he received academic training in classical painting and sculpture, laying the technical foundation for his work. After completing his studies, he moved to South Africa, where he began developing his own visual language, enriched by the region’s cultural and environmental diversity.
Artistic Work in South Africa
In South Africa, Al Halabi emerged as a muralist and sculptor whose work began attracting attention for its distinctive blend of symbolism and realism. His murals offered expansive spaces to explore the human condition in dialogue with the surrounding environment. Through surreal elements, he created visual narratives where reality and imagination coexisted—infusing his works with a meditative depth that revealed the layered complexities of human experience.
Relocation to New Zealand: Exploring Dreams and Nature
In the late 1990s, Al Halabi relocated to New Zealand, where the untouched landscape and tranquil atmosphere became a spiritual extension of his artistic exploration. His work entered a new phase, in which nature became more than a backdrop—it became a living participant in the visual narrative, pulsing with dreamlike and symbolic energy. Through paintings and sculptures, he merged natural forms with symbols drawn from memory and the subconscious, expressing the existential relationship between human beings and place, between what is seen and what is felt.
Artistic Identity and Style
Al Halabi's style is defined by a rare integration of surrealism and realism, with frequent shifts into abstraction. This hybrid approach grants him expressive freedom that resonates both personally and universally. He does not seek to offer definitive answers; instead, he treats art as an open question—a space for reflection and rebellion against fixed forms. His artistic identity thrives on doubt, experimentation, and fluidity. His work invites inquiries into presence and absence, memory and the subconscious, dream and reality, allowing viewers to traverse realms that transcend the visible toward the emotional and the unseen.
Current Life and Work
Al Halabi is currently based in New Zealand, continuing to produce works that explore memory, dream, and nature. Utilizing a range of techniques—from academic drawing to experimental sculpture and immersive mural work—he remains committed to investigating the relationship between human beings, time, and space through a contemporary artistic lens.
Notable Public Works in New Zealand
Possum Bourne Statue
A life-sized bronze sculpture commemorating legendary rally driver Possum Bourne. The statue depicts him standing in a moment of calm, gazing toward the horizon—a portrayal of inner strength, confidence, and quiet determination.
“Shrek” the Sheep
A popular sculpture honoring Shrek, the sheep who became a national icon after evading shearing for six years in the mountains. The statue, rendered in a realistic and playful style, captures Shrek’s massive, woolly form and embodies themes of freedom and resilience.
William Rees Memorial
A commemorative statue of William Rees, the founder of Queenstown. The sculpture shows Rees standing beside a sheep, symbolizing early European settlement, rural life, and the bond between humans and the land.
Minhal Al Halabi represents a distinctive voice in the contemporary art scene. Drawing from diverse cultures, diasporic experience, and a profound sense of longing, he transforms personal narratives into a visual language that engages with the world through inquiry rather than conclusion. In his work, technique and vision are inseparable, and form and meaning interweave—creating immersive experiences that speak to the senses and reshape memory.