The autumn 2016 gallery season is one of the best ever for the UAE. Here’s magpie’s pick of the shows we think you shouldn’t miss in the next week or so.
The Rose Garden In Mind Vol. II
15 Sep to 2 Oct ProArt Gallery, Palm Strip Shopping Mal, Jumeriah
Leily Derakhshani’s first show with this name ran at ProArt in 2013, and was one of the undersung highlights of that season. She currently lives and works in Tehran, and she comes from a family of artists; a sculptor by training, she’s best known as an Illustrator (for children’s books) and a painter – especially of the stylised figurative work exemplified by this show. It’s a form that is refreshingly free from obscure reference and complex allusions, and her work is almost deconstructed in its approach.
You can also see the elegant simplicity of illustration for children in these paintings; they aren’t merely interior design, but they are eminently decorative in the best sense of the word.
She says: ‘’the present collection has been painted in several phases with dense oil color and Isoroph (a type of tar) on the canvas. This technique helps me to improvise in any phase, sin such a way that any trend differs from the previous one along with a strict different result’’.
Sharjah Art Foundation Collection Photo by Christian Schepe
Arnulf Rainer: Towards Overpaintings
17 Sep to 1 Nov Sharjah Art Foundation, Bait Al Serkal, Sharjah
SAF is starting the new season with a run of good shows, including this retrospective with early works by the noted Austrian nea-Surrealist, something of an enfant terrible in his early days.
Largely self taught (he aborted his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna after three days because he found them unsatisfying) he was initially keen to investigate the potential of dreams, madness and the subconscious; but from 1951 to 1954 he worked on a series of Blind Drawings, seeking to replace pictorial composition and form with the immediacy of accidentally encountered textures. Some of these are included in this show, along with examples of his major body of work – from 1953 to 1965 – which he termed Overpaintings. The key was destruction of form; here he took examples of his early expressive drawings and pictures by friends, reworking them with overpainting to produce works that are typically near-monochrome paintings in black or red.
The exhibition also includes sculptures, archival documents and videos; some of these early works are being shown for the first time.
AKamal Youssef: Egyptian Surrealism’s Time Capsule
17 Sep to 17 Nov Sharjah Art Museum
Another impressive SAF show, this one for the Egyptian-American master Kamal Youssef. Born in 1923, Youssef has been productive for more than 70 years with a distinctive style of painting and sculpture; trained as an engineer, he moved to the States in the 1950s to make the most of the artistic and economic freedom but he never lost his sympathy with the people of his homeland – who figure in many of his paintings.
Over the past seven decades, doomsayers have regularly declared that figurative work was dead; Youssef has resolutely followed his own path, pursues his exploration of the human condition through the stance, expression and environment he distributes among the multitude of figures (people, roosters, owls) that populate his paintings. At the same time he has always explored colour and form in stylistically reduced compositions that clearly combine aspects of several genres – among them Surrealism, folk art, Expressionism, and even the art of ancient Egyptian. This is an interesting artist, a little out of the mainstream of fashion these days but infinitely rewarding.
Judy Rifka: RETROactive
18 Sep to 13 Nov Jean Paul Najar Foundation, Alserkal Avenue
A clever name for this show by the uber-cool NYC artist, prominent first in the 1970s and exhaustingly productive in a variety of genre-busting styles ever since. Jean Paul Najar had the good sense to buy a good deal of Rifka’s work in the early days, hence the ‘retro’ part of the title; that’s being shown alongside newer work, including video pieces and the new paintings she’s done in the two weeks’ residency running up to the opening (‘active’).
Her work (video, collage, paintings) remains accessible, sometimes entertaining, usually understandable, and still connected to the urban vibe. It’s based on an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary, one that has absorbed obvious pop elements; Rifka was closely associated with the emergence of graffiti art and the incipient Lower East Side scene of the 1970s) but has been refuelled successively by other influences – by life, in fact – and remains unmistakably fresh. Unstoppably prolific, Judy Rifka is still riding the downtown zeitgeist.
The JP Najar Foundation is one of the few galleries in the UAE that doesn’t exist to make money from sales; for that reason alone it’s worth supporting, but this show really demonstrates what a good eye its founder had for innovative, up-and-coming artists.
Christine Kettaneh and Monika Grabuschnigg: Visceral Silence
18 Sep to 7 Nov Carbon 12, Alserkal Avenue
Carbon 12’s autumn show pairs a couple of artists who pose questions about communication and identity, playing with the idea of just what language is (or might be) and what it’s for, albeit via very different artistic practices.
In the trio of works that make up Mute Melodies (2013) Beirut-based Lebanese artist Christine Kettaneh offers hieroglyphic codes that turn out to be laser-cut engravings on plywood, each tracing the contours of keys. Those keys belong to the artist’s friends; but the cutting outlines the negative space, the pieces that go missing when the key is cut. Fitting that key into its lock is an apt metaphor for friendship in particular and human communication in general, about ownership and possession, about exclusion and separation.
Monika Grabuschnigg’s heavily glazed ornamental ceramics that riff on the ornate decoration beloved of the European wealthy in the 18th and 19th centuries. She uses loud, sometimes clashing glazes; the pieces feature pop allusions, hints of weapon shapes, fetishistic decorative motifs. They speak of contemporary identity, the way that boundaries are so easily crossed with cultural artefacts. The silence here is palpable; we can add our own words.
Chaouki Choukini: Poetry in Wood
18 Sep to 30 Oct Green Art Gallery, Alserkal Avenue
It’s a pleasure to find a gallery with the confidence to show 3D work, especially crafted work with the lyricism that Chaouki Choukini brings to his art. He works with wood, polishing the grain and moulding the variety of shapes that fold and unfold under his hand. Smooth planes give way to jagged ridges, and small, deft gouges are etched into soft wood like nicks and cuts in skin.
For Choukini,, sculpture offers a window back to what he refers to as the “landscape of childhood” – to the people, places, and memories of South Lebanon. The works in this show cover four decades, from 1972 to 2016, and so present an impressive cross-section through Choukini’s ever-evolving sculptural practice.
Slavs and Tatars: Reverse Dschihad / Made in Germany
18 Sep to 22 Oct The Third Line, Alserkal Avenue
The Berlin collective grouped under the name Slavs and Tatars is always interesting and always manages to be relevant. This show, for instance, covers the unlikely story of German Orientalism and what it can tell us about Europe’s contemporary relationship to Islam.
At its simplest, this is a witty take on the German state’s attempt to ingratiate itself with Arabia; the failures of transliteration, the mirror that offers a distorted reflection, the PraySway prayer-beads that let you swing between the two poles of sacred and profane activity that are at the heart of Orientalism.
The piece called Made in Germany sums it up: the classic imprimatur of quality is spelled out phonetically using Arabic letters, a military alphabet proposed by the Ottoman minister of war for wartime correspondence. The British were able to use it to mock Germany’s behind-the-scenes role in the declaration of war by the Ottoman Empire, a state to whom few Muslims looked for spiritual guidance.
This is a characteristically witty show about the often uncomfortable interface between cultures. Well worth seeing.
Lara Zankoul: As Cold as a White Stone
20 Sep to 17 Nov Ayyam Gallery, DIFC
Lara Zankoul’s show deals with what the photographer describes as “the coldness, resistance, and numbness of human relationships nowadays”. Anonymous figures in awkward poses are set against the backdrop of the Carrara marble quarries she discovered during a recent artist residency in Italy; this is the same Carrara marble so beloved of the Renaissance artists, who used it to celebrate the idealised primacy of mankind.
In Lara Zankoul’s images it provides a hard and harsh environment against which her withdrawn figures represent “the nature of human interactions in a world dominated by individualism, virtual life, and ego/selfishness”. The marble is solid, stolid, cold, impersonal; her people are stark, abstracted, depersonalised by their simple clothing or their nakedness.
The Perpetual Kingdom: Contemporary Arabic Calligraphy
21 Sep to 31 Oct Gallery Ward, Dubai Design District
There seems to be even more calligraphy than usual in the galleries right now, and the increasing interest in contemporary styles and subjects is one reason for that. This show could turn out to be an interesting benchmark, featuring a variety of artworks by artists including some big names – the roster is Nja Mahdawi, Wisam Shawkat, Majid Alyoussef, Sasan Nassernia, Mater Bin Lahej, Abdul Qader Al Rais, Najat Makki, Mona Alkhaja, Sameh Ismail, Hazem El-Mistikawy and Tagelsir Hassan.
It definitely reflects the power of the Arabic lettering style, but more important it also shows how the lines between technique and content can become blurred. Calligraphic forms are being used here for purposes some distance removed from the original (historical) intentions, but at the same time the cultural allusions are inescapable. If you want to see what ‘calligraphy’ means today, especially in the hands of local artists, this is a must-do show.
Invisible Threads: Technology and its Discontents
22 Sep to 31 Dec NYUAD Art Gallery, Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi
The Fall exhibition at the NYUAD Art Gallery on Saadiyat features works by 15 international artists – some very big names among them – to consider the tensions in our everyday relationships with technology. That’s a great topic, not exactly original but still very pertinent and allowing for a good variety of artistic explorations.
So Invisible Threads promises “a nuanced discussion of a global topic, framed by the region’s complex relationship to the benefits and pitfalls that accompany technological advances”. The curators – Bana Kattan of the NYUAD gallery and Scott Fitzgerald, Assistant Arts Professor and Head of Interactive Media at NYUAD – say they hope to generate dialogue and reflection around our use of these everyday tools.
The 15 artists in the exhibition are Jamie Allen, Aram Bartholl, Taysir Batniji, Wafaa Bilal, Liu Bolin, Jonah Brucker Cohen, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Michael Joaquin Grey, Monira Al Qadiri, Evan Roth, Phillip Stearns, Siebren Versteeg, Addie Wagenknecht, Kenny Wong – and Ai Weiwei, whose superstar status means he has been getting all the media attention. But this is a meaty, stimulating show with more than one focus …
Be the first to comment