A mirage, a memory, a timeless convergence where Expressionism meets Surrealism and city meets space. “In Arabic riyadh translates to ‘oasis within a desert,’” the artist Alia Ahmad has said. “My intention is to illuminate that there is a lot of life from a land that is perceived as dry.” Ahmad was born in 1996, in the capital of Saudi Arabia—Riyadh—where she grew up amid its industrial desert landscape. She then studied at Kings College, London. Her abstract paintings, very large, are energized by a color-drenched sense of place. “Thought to Image” is Ahmad’s first solo show in the U.K. —Laura Jacobs