b. 1955, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Abdul Raheem Salem is credited as one of the founders of the Emirates Fine Art Society and a major educator of the local arts along with those such as Dr. Mohamed Yousif. Forgoing his early gypsum and wooden sculptures since the early 1990s, he now practices in acrylics, pastels and collage. 

Born in Dubai along the seaside, he moved to Bahrain with his mother following his father's early death. Finding solace in expressing himself through art while in Bahrain, he achieved recognition by the time he was 14 years old, participating in the Bahrain Annual Fine Arts Exhibition. (To be noted the Bahrain arts development was established earlier than the UAE) Equipped with the early arts skills in Bahrain, he moved back to Dubai and found himself training at the Cairo College of Fine Arts, graduating in 1981.

Returning to the UAE at a time where the visual arts was less appreciated, he worked with other graduates from Cairo, Baghdad, London and South California to establish the first art society in Sharjah that same year. He worked as a public school teacher, and later creating children's art workbooks through the Ministry of Education.

Since the early 1990s, he has focused his entire oeuvre on an old Emirati legend of Muhaira - a slave girl who rejected a man's courtship and found herself under a curse and eventually died alone. Finding Muhaira in his earlier figurative and most recently abstract art, this internalized grief is a way for him to expiate her intolerance with society's expectations, something the artist felt with his own aspirations to become an artist.

The artist currently lives in Dubai, where he works out of his studio continuing his practice.