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Dubai: As the UAE President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan held talks in Berlin this week, one Dubai-based artist is a living symbol of the friendship being celebrated between the two nations.
Petra Kaltenbach, 64, a German painter, designer and sculptor who has called Dubai home since 2004, has spent the past few years building a growing body of work, especially around a single fruit: the pomegranate.
The award-winning artist and curator, who has expertise in graphic design and video art, moved to Dubai in 2004 after two decades running an advertising agency in Germany.
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In 2016, Petra was shortlisted for the International Emerging Artist Award. In 2018, her video art was shown on the facade of Burj Khalifa, and that same year she was named best UAE-resident artist at World Art Dubai.
She was also given a year-long sponsorship by Canon for her work with UV-printing technology, and since 2019 has been part of the curatorial team at World Art Dubai, one of the biggest art fairs in the Middle East.
Her pomegranate motif has run through much of this work, including a hybrid NFT series that used augmented reality to bring her paintings to life as part of the NFT wave that swept the art world a few years ago.
In 2022, she won the Best Emerging NFT Artist at the Gulf News Web3 Awards.
Everybody’s Darling
Petra’s latest chapter moves the pomegranate into sculpture. Her series, Everybody’s Darling, now runs to roughly 40 pieces. “A pomegranate is a symbol of love,” she explains, describing her signature piece as “a love-dispensing pomegranate… a peace bringer.”
“This is very important at this point in time,” she told Gulf News on Thursday.
“I feel the pomegranate is everybody’s darling,” she said, calling it a symbol of “love, health, wealth, the divine, of life itself” across cultures and religions.
Lips sculpted onto its surface give the fruit a sense of smile and love, while other pieces take on different meanings: a winged “Divine Darling” nods to the spiritual, and a slowly melting “Be My Darling” reflects surrender to love.
The 3D-printed sculptures, made in the UAE with local partners, range from 15 centimetres to more than a metre in diameter, and can be scaled further on request.
Each piece is hand-finished, with some painted in Arabic-inspired patterns.
Petra is also developing wall-mounted pomegranate sculptures, flat on the reverse so they can hang like paintings, along with a new flower-adorned pomegranate piece exploring the theme of wealth.
World Art Dubai and beyond
The new sculptures will be showcased at World Art Dubai, running from November 19 to 22, where Petra currently serves as a strategic advisor, having helped shape the fair’s artist-in-residence programme.
She is also strategic art advisor to the UAE’s first dedicated German gallery, founded by two German-Arab brothers, expected to open around the same time.
In October, Petra is scheduled to travel to Ankara, Turkey, for the ninth edition of SDGs Through Arts, a residency initiated by Zee Arts founder Zaahirah Muthy in collaboration with the UN-UAE and UNESCO.
Running from October 8 to 11 at Galerim Sanat gallery, the project pairs 17 international artists, including Petra, with 17 Turkish artists to create work around the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Bridging cultures
A recipient of Dubai’s ten-year cultural visa, Petra’s ties to German-UAE cultural diplomacy run deep.
In 2022, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs commissioned her to create five paintings, five videos and an augmented-reality installation marking 50 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries, with events in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Ras Al Khaimah that each drew more than a thousand visitors.
She has also linked Ras Al Khaimah’s RAK Art Festival with the German Consulate General and the Goethe Institut as well, so that they can invite more German artists to the festival.
Petra noted that the German community in the UAE has nearly doubled in the past four to five years. “I try to connect my government with the cultural scene here,” she said.
Reflecting on her role, Petra said her use of Arabic patterns alongside European artistic traditions has become central to her practice, blending the two cultures she now calls home.
As Berlin and Abu Dhabi deepen ties this week, her pomegranates offer a quieter, artistic version of the same story.
