Passion for Art
April
April 2012
MANAMA
CAPITAL
OF
ARAB
CULTURE
2012
CAPITAL
OF
ARAB
CULTURE
2012
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Selected works from the
38th Annual Fine Arts Exhibition
38th Annual Fine Arts Exhibition
THE WHIPPET-THIN, fast-talking, beautiful young gallerist, Yasmin Atassi sits down to talk to me at the Green Gallery in the warehouse gallery district of Al Serkal Avenue during Art Dubai.
The ostensible point for the interview is to view the show Brute Ornament featuring the work of Kamrooz Aram and Seher Shah, yet immediately she and I get into a fascinating discussion of the state of the art world in the Gulf, and her history as the daughter of a famous dealer of Iraqi and Syria Modernists, Mayla Atassi.
“My mother was one of the first real gallerists in Dubai. She started dealing in the late 1980s, and became a leading dealer in the 1990s. When she became ill and then passed away in 2007, I had to decide whether to sell her gallery -- which was really more a Salon D’Art --and walk away, but I realized that the art had become part of my DNA and I realized that I wanted to carry on her legacy -- yet with contemporary artists and in a new way.
“Her gallery was in a small villa in Jumeirah, and between 2004 and 2008, I began to work in the business but I feel that a lot of what was on offer during that period was really not great quality. Many people think the art boom in the ME.NA.SA region all started in 2006, but they don’t know that the region, -- whether its Iraq, Syria, whether its Egypt, whether its Lebanon, has had a very long cultural history. I like to think of it in the way that it was succinctly summed up by curator, Hans Ullrich Obrist’s statement, “The protest against forgetting”.
“In early 2010 I moved to this gallery and feel that that was when I really began to feel focused on what I wanted to do intellectually and aesthetically with the gallery. The first thing I decided was that I needed a long-term plan, and that I wanted to work with artists with real intellectual and aesthetic integrity. I realize that this might seem commercially suicidal,” she laughs. “But I knew that I wanted to establish myself as a serious dealer and therefore even if I had to do some shows that I knew might not sell very well to the casual collector, they would at least signal to the international art world what we were all about”.
Ms. Atassi’s gamble is beginning to pay off. This year she is off to Art Basel in Switzerland and the Hong Kong Art Fair, both difficult to get into, and extremely critically vetted venues. At Basel the gallery will be featuring the work of a Palestinian artist, Shadi-Habib Allah, who was born in Jerusalem and carries and Israeli passport.
Having said that, Ms. Atassi says bluntly, “I hate political art, and I hate the term Middle Eastern artist. My dream is that one day that will no longer be a moniker for artists from the region, and that this period that we are going through now will raise the best of the artists from this part of the world to the international stage so that the complexity and sophistication of their art can be appreciated in a global context and that their many references and universal themes will overshadow the focus at the moment on, for example, the endless question I am asked: “How are artists reacting to the Arab Spring”.
“For me,” she continues, “It is far too early for artists to be doing work that says anything meaningful about current events in the region and it will take time before this particular period of history can be metabolized”.
The ostensible point for the interview is to view the show Brute Ornament featuring the work of Kamrooz Aram and Seher Shah, yet immediately she and I get into a fascinating discussion of the state of the art world in the Gulf, and her history as the daughter of a famous dealer of Iraqi and Syria Modernists, Mayla Atassi.
“My mother was one of the first real gallerists in Dubai. She started dealing in the late 1980s, and became a leading dealer in the 1990s. When she became ill and then passed away in 2007, I had to decide whether to sell her gallery -- which was really more a Salon D’Art --and walk away, but I realized that the art had become part of my DNA and I realized that I wanted to carry on her legacy -- yet with contemporary artists and in a new way.
“Her gallery was in a small villa in Jumeirah, and between 2004 and 2008, I began to work in the business but I feel that a lot of what was on offer during that period was really not great quality. Many people think the art boom in the ME.NA.SA region all started in 2006, but they don’t know that the region, -- whether its Iraq, Syria, whether its Egypt, whether its Lebanon, has had a very long cultural history. I like to think of it in the way that it was succinctly summed up by curator, Hans Ullrich Obrist’s statement, “The protest against forgetting”.
“In early 2010 I moved to this gallery and feel that that was when I really began to feel focused on what I wanted to do intellectually and aesthetically with the gallery. The first thing I decided was that I needed a long-term plan, and that I wanted to work with artists with real intellectual and aesthetic integrity. I realize that this might seem commercially suicidal,” she laughs. “But I knew that I wanted to establish myself as a serious dealer and therefore even if I had to do some shows that I knew might not sell very well to the casual collector, they would at least signal to the international art world what we were all about”.
Ms. Atassi’s gamble is beginning to pay off. This year she is off to Art Basel in Switzerland and the Hong Kong Art Fair, both difficult to get into, and extremely critically vetted venues. At Basel the gallery will be featuring the work of a Palestinian artist, Shadi-Habib Allah, who was born in Jerusalem and carries and Israeli passport.
Having said that, Ms. Atassi says bluntly, “I hate political art, and I hate the term Middle Eastern artist. My dream is that one day that will no longer be a moniker for artists from the region, and that this period that we are going through now will raise the best of the artists from this part of the world to the international stage so that the complexity and sophistication of their art can be appreciated in a global context and that their many references and universal themes will overshadow the focus at the moment on, for example, the endless question I am asked: “How are artists reacting to the Arab Spring”.
“For me,” she continues, “It is far too early for artists to be doing work that says anything meaningful about current events in the region and it will take time before this particular period of history can be metabolized”.
Yasmin Atassi
Director/
Green Gallery
Director/
Green Gallery
“It is far too early for artists to be doing work that says anything meaningful about current events in the region and it will take time before this particular period of history can be metabolized.”
Yasmin and Aquamarina pose in front of Kamrooz Aram - Angelus Novus - Reconstructed - 2011. Oil on canvas, 213 x 168 cm
Brute Ornament:
Kamrooz Aram and Seher Shah
As if to prove her point, Ms. Atassi takes me through the extremely elegant and thought- provoking show currently on view at the gallery: Brute Ornament. Large canvases by Iranian-born, New York-based artist, Kamrooz Aram hang in a natural dialectic with intense and intricate drawings with black geometric shapes by Seher Shah, born in Pakistan, and now also living in New York’s Brooklyn borough.
This is no lightweight show and could be seen as a serious exhibit equally as well in Berlin, or New York or any of the world’s culture capitals. The two artists deal with separate yet overlapping themes, imagery and technique.
Aram’s large colorful canvases, Ms. Atassi explains, are a contemplation, among other things, about what it is to be “decorative” and “ornamental”. He seeks to transcend the anxiety that many serious painters including the Abstract Expressionists and the Viennese Secessionists felt with regard to being denigrated as “decorative” in the pejorative sense of the word, in essence, lightweight. In the essay written by Media Farzin on Aram’s work for the show’s catalogue, entitled: “Discordant Ornament”, Farzin explains, “Aram draws on a historic vocabulary of classical ornamental motifs, geometric abstraction, and gestural painting to create an image of painterly disintegration.....What Aram refers to as ‘cultural nostalgia’”, Farzin continues, “is important to understanding his approach. If the flowers and acanthus leaves signal a history of ornament that conjures up, say, Islamic scrollwork, then the rigid geometry of his triangles and circles are just as redolent of Modernism’s early avant-gardes of Suprematism and Constructivism”.
Kamrooz Aram and Seher Shah
As if to prove her point, Ms. Atassi takes me through the extremely elegant and thought- provoking show currently on view at the gallery: Brute Ornament. Large canvases by Iranian-born, New York-based artist, Kamrooz Aram hang in a natural dialectic with intense and intricate drawings with black geometric shapes by Seher Shah, born in Pakistan, and now also living in New York’s Brooklyn borough.
This is no lightweight show and could be seen as a serious exhibit equally as well in Berlin, or New York or any of the world’s culture capitals. The two artists deal with separate yet overlapping themes, imagery and technique.
Aram’s large colorful canvases, Ms. Atassi explains, are a contemplation, among other things, about what it is to be “decorative” and “ornamental”. He seeks to transcend the anxiety that many serious painters including the Abstract Expressionists and the Viennese Secessionists felt with regard to being denigrated as “decorative” in the pejorative sense of the word, in essence, lightweight. In the essay written by Media Farzin on Aram’s work for the show’s catalogue, entitled: “Discordant Ornament”, Farzin explains, “Aram draws on a historic vocabulary of classical ornamental motifs, geometric abstraction, and gestural painting to create an image of painterly disintegration.....What Aram refers to as ‘cultural nostalgia’”, Farzin continues, “is important to understanding his approach. If the flowers and acanthus leaves signal a history of ornament that conjures up, say, Islamic scrollwork, then the rigid geometry of his triangles and circles are just as redolent of Modernism’s early avant-gardes of Suprematism and Constructivism”.
Some of the most interesting and arresting of Aram’s paintings in the show are two “Palimpsest” paintings; one an homage to Twombly, the other an homage to Beirut. In these layered images (the definition of a palimpsest, the peeling away of layers to reveal what is underneath). Although these works are aesthetically pleasing in a superficial way, they are also endlessly intellectually interesting as they include a wide variety of cultural and aesthetic “clues” and references such as the winding flowers on Persian carpets to the Islamic scrollwork patterns. Aram’s darker and “violent” pieces more directly attack the theme of the “Brutalist” architectural movement. Again using layered black paint, with black painted ornament, often with a central form or object --suffused with a deep and sublime light rendered in gossamer layers of flesh tones and gold -- these works grapple with the reach towards the highest levels of communion with the Divine. The sublimity is juxtaposed with highly precise and secular geometric shapes, signaling an unstable and violent world.
The intense drawings of Seher Shah, a rumination on the roots, flowering and demise of what has now become known as the “Brutalist” architecture championed by French architect, Le Corbusier, compliment and speak to Aram’s paintings in a way that suggests the cerebral and analytic mind of the architect and urban planner in a dialogue with the emotional and expressionistic mind of the poet/artist.
Shah’s drawings, which Atassi explains, take the artist many months to complete, are both a reconstruction and a de-construction of the post-Modernist period of architecture, now almost entirely discounted as ugly, concrete high-rise urban blocks --once famously referred to by the Prince of Wales as a “carbuncle on the ...”
Yet, at the time of their construction, buildings such as the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St. Louis, Missouri and the Robin Hood Garden housing blocks in London’s East End were intended to be a response to the over-decorated excesses of the Victorian period, and a return to an almost Utopian purity. They also coincided, not coincidentally with the period of masculine, fascist culture which arose in response to what many during the period saw as the collapse of Europe during the period after World War I as a result of what some designated as a period of overly effeminate tendencies in the Art Nouveau period.
Shah’s drawing can both be enjoyed at a distance, as decorative etchings, or microscopically as highly linear urban plans.
In closing, as I left the gallery, I bumped into the artist, Aram walking in, and we arranged a visit his Studio in New York -- a visit that I await with great anticipation as the sanctum sanctorum where these impressive works are rendered, will, I suspect, be something marvelous to see.
The intense drawings of Seher Shah, a rumination on the roots, flowering and demise of what has now become known as the “Brutalist” architecture championed by French architect, Le Corbusier, compliment and speak to Aram’s paintings in a way that suggests the cerebral and analytic mind of the architect and urban planner in a dialogue with the emotional and expressionistic mind of the poet/artist.
Shah’s drawings, which Atassi explains, take the artist many months to complete, are both a reconstruction and a de-construction of the post-Modernist period of architecture, now almost entirely discounted as ugly, concrete high-rise urban blocks --once famously referred to by the Prince of Wales as a “carbuncle on the ...”
Yet, at the time of their construction, buildings such as the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St. Louis, Missouri and the Robin Hood Garden housing blocks in London’s East End were intended to be a response to the over-decorated excesses of the Victorian period, and a return to an almost Utopian purity. They also coincided, not coincidentally with the period of masculine, fascist culture which arose in response to what many during the period saw as the collapse of Europe during the period after World War I as a result of what some designated as a period of overly effeminate tendencies in the Art Nouveau period.
Shah’s drawing can both be enjoyed at a distance, as decorative etchings, or microscopically as highly linear urban plans.
In closing, as I left the gallery, I bumped into the artist, Aram walking in, and we arranged a visit his Studio in New York -- a visit that I await with great anticipation as the sanctum sanctorum where these impressive works are rendered, will, I suspect, be something marvelous to see.