artBahrain.org

25 JANUARY
37th Annual
Fine Arts Exhibition
Bahrain National Museum

Bahrain Art Week commenced with the highly anticipated Annual Fine Arts Exhibition last 25 January. The annual exhibition is a juried show that has been running for 37 years under the patronage of HRH Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, the Prime Minister of Bahrain. It was the first major art event and is distinguished as one of the longest standing award programmes in the Arabian Gulf region.

The 37th Annual Fine Arts Exhibition celebrates and rewards Bahraini contemporary visual artists who are working independently at a high level of artistic maturity. This year, the art-world validators considered more than 50 entries by artists working mostly on painting and sculpture relevant to the theme “Water: Startling and Still.”

HRH Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa congratulated the award winners and honoured the contribution of all the participants.

The highly coveted Al Dana prize, the signature award, honours Adel Mohammed Al Abbasi whose sculptural assemblages of faucets were strikingly different. He is the thirty-seventh recipient of the award given to a Bahraini artist that is meant to encourage the artist’s future development and experimentation.

Honourable mentions went to paintings by: Balqees Fakhro -ecological overtones that reveals autonomous energy; Riyadh Mansoor - display of avant-gardist impulses; and Hadir Al Bukhari - decorative abstraction of meticulous multiple overlapping systems.

As the Annual Fine Arts Exhibition is a firmly established part of the Kingdom of Bahrain’s annual visual art diary, it is a convergence of Bahraini artists that provides a fascinating glimpse into the Bahraini contemporary art practice which should not be missed. The exhibition will run until 25 February at the Bahrain National Museum.

27 JANUARY
BFH Fine Arts Gallery Inaugural Exhibition

THE INAUGURAL exhibition at the new BFH Fine Art Gallery is a hit parade of Salvador Dali’s monumental sculptures stunningly installed on the 275 sqm exhibition space at the West Atrium of the Harbour Towers.

Under the patronage of HE Shaikha Mai bin Mohammed Al Khalifa, Bahrain’s Minister of Culture, the exhibition entitled, OPERA GALLERY & SALVADOR DALI Awaken your Imagination in Bahrain - brings to the kingdom the Catalan’s master’s surrealist dreamscapes in three dimension.

The event was exceedingly well attended and bursting with devoted art collectors, VIPs and foreign dignitaries as well as dealers, curators and artists in a mix of sculptural installations.

Cast in bronze, these sculptures were conceived by Dalí based on his famous pictures such as the Persistence of Memory, the Profile of Time, the Nobility of Time, Dance of Time II, the Triumphant Elephant and Space Elephant all very strongly reveal the force of expression of his iconographic surrealist image. This show also brings to light Dali’s unseen jewelled sculptures like Alice in Wonderland, Space Venus, Profile of Time - to name a few.

Together with works by Picasso, Renoir, Arman, Botero and a host of other famous 20^th and 21^st century artists, OPERA GALLERY & SALVADOR DALI Awaken your Imagination in Bahrain - offers a reflexive history of “isms” and art works associated with them.

Unlike other ‘artist curates’ type shows, this exhibition curated by Opera Gallery’s managing director does not seemed to articulate a collective vision but instead it aesthetically positions the BFH Fine Art Gallery as pioneer in ‘international’ high profile art exhibitions that enriches the cultural experience of its visitors and guarantees that these quality shows will be served up time and again.

29 JANUARY
Private collections
at Bin Matar House
for public viewing

ENJOYING A growing reputation as an austerely chic contemporary art mecca, Bin Matar House did not fall short this week with its Collectors Exhibition showcasing a small personable art collection by Bahrainis with the noble calling of art patronage.

16 paintings and a sculpture from Bahrain’s pioneering collectors will allow audiences to enjoy and study superb examples of works dating back to the second half of the 19th century to late 1990s.

The exhibition shows an incongruous mix of works by Egyptian artists Yousef Ahmed Ali Seedah and Abdulmonim Mutawa; British artists Charles Belgrave, Edward Arthur Walton and Angust Lamplough; Bahrani artists Hussain Al Sunni and Abdulla Muharraqi; Iraqi artists Fayek Hassan, Khudour Gargis and Dia Azzawi; Syrian artist Fateh Moudarress and many others. Together with the paintings is the heartthrob of the show - a sculpture by Columbian artist Fernando Botero, will all be in public view until 3 February.

As art is a ‘reflection of oneself,’ this exhibition also gives us a deeper insight of the people who influence the growth and production of contemporary art in the Kingdom. Although some collectors acquired the most representative of a period, some simply followed their own tastes.

Most interesting, perhaps, is that the viewer will observe universality in art that connects across the boundaries of Western culture to the peoples of other continents - encouraging appreciation and understanding of art and its vital role in our society.