Reynier Llanes’ “Elsewhere, Within” at Firetti Contemporary, Dubai: When the Figure Becomes a Vase of Flowers

Imagine a portrait in which the sitter has been replaced by a glass vessel crammed with flowers — transparent, fragile, and holding everything that person has gathered along the way. That is the premise of Bodega, the new series at the centre of Reynier Llanes’ “Elsewhere, Within” at Firetti Contemporary in Dubai. The exhibition runs from 16 November 2026 to 16 January 2027 on Alserkal Avenue and opens as the city’s art calendar reaches its busiest point, with Alserkal Art Week under way.

From Pinar del Río to an international practice

Llanes was born in 1985 in Pinar del Río, in Cuba’s tobacco-growing west. According to the gallery, he spent four years at the Instructores de Arte school in his home city, graduating in 2004 under the painter Juan Miguel Suárez, and moved to Havana in 2005. His trajectory since then has been largely American: museum solo exhibitions at the Butler Institute of American Art (2022) and the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston (2024), and works in collections including the Denver Art Museum, the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, the Snite Museum of Art and the Morris Museum of Art. In 2012 the magazine Oxford American named him among its “100 Under 100” new stars of Southern art.

Dubai audiences already know him: his first Firetti show, Reverie, opened in 2025. “Elsewhere, Within” is his second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Three series, one question

The exhibition gathers work from three bodies of painting. The Tourist and The Poet are established series; Bodega is shown for the first time. The Poet, which Llanes began during the pandemic, presents a translucent figure without a fixed identity — less a portrait than a vessel for anyone’s inner life. In Bodega, the gallery explains, that transparency migrates from the body to actual vessels: glass containers filled with flowers that stand in for the places, relationships and memories accumulated over a lifetime.

It is a clever move. The still life of flowers in a vase is one of painting’s oldest genres, loaded with ideas of beauty, abundance and transience. By using it to replace the human figure, Llanes turns a decorative convention into a kind of self-portrait by inventory: we are what we have collected. As the gallery puts it, “Bodega marks a new development in Llanes’ visual language.”

Reynier Llanes’ paintings: works to look for

The exhibition page singles out several works. Halos shows two divers intertwined in a field of grass and flowers — a suspended, weightless image that sits somewhere between swimming and embracing. Time Travelers places the Poet curled in a bathtub, a scene the gallery traces to a childhood memory of the artist’s grandmother’s home in rural Cuba. Eden depicts a couple beneath an apple tree, an unmistakable nod to the Garden of Eden. Across all three, the themes are storytelling, memory and the way encounters with people and places shape who we become.

Stylistically, the gallery describes a painter trained in Realism who has been moving towards a looser, more Impressionistic touch. The number of works and their materials are not specified, so visitors will have to see for themselves how far that loosening goes in the new Bodega canvases.

Why it matters for collectors and painters

For collectors in the Gulf, Llanes offers something relatively rare on Alserkal Avenue: a figurative Cuban painter with a solid American museum record, presented at the moment he introduces a new series. First showings of a series are often where the defining works sit. Prices are not published, so contact the gallery directly.

For painters, the show is a lesson in how to evolve without breaking continuity. Rather than abandoning The Poet, Llanes extracts its key quality — transparency — and carries it into a new subject. It is a useful model for anyone wondering how a long-running motif can generate the next body of work.

Firetti Contemporary and Alserkal Avenue

Firetti Contemporary is based in Unit 29 on Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz, Dubai’s densest cluster of galleries and project spaces. Opening the day after Alserkal Art Week begins, the show is well placed for a day of gallery-hopping; the gallery is open every day of the week.

Visiting information

Firetti Contemporary, Alserkal Avenue, Unit 29, Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Dubai. 16 November 2026 – 16 January 2027. Open Monday–Sunday, 11am–7pm; private viewings by appointment. Opening reception details have not been announced — check with the gallery: +971 50 858 3442, [email protected].

See the official exhibition page, our exhibition listing, and more Dubai openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.

Image: Reynier Llanes, Blue Sky, 2022, oil on canvas — an earlier work shown for reference. © Reynier Llanes. Courtesy Adelson Galleries.