Mar 22 2019

Highlights from Art Dubai 2019

by Paul Laster

The entrance to Art Dubai 2019 at the Madinat Jumeirah resort.

Now in its 13th year, Art Dubai returned to the Madinat Jumeirah resort with the fair’s most extensive and internationally diverse program to date. With 92 galleries from 42 countries exhibiting works by more than 500 artists representing 80 nationalities, the fair offered a wide array of creative styles and concerns.

The new Bawwaba section presented solo booths tackling migration, identity and economics by artists from the Global South, while the Residents sector, now in its second year, featured projects by Latin American artists who had been invited by Art Dubai to spend four to eight weeks in the United Arab Emirates producing work especially for the fair. Despite the international focus, Dubai galleries were also well represented, with major local commerical spaces such as Ayyam, Green Art Gallery, Isabelle van den Eynde, and Lawrie Shabibi participating.

Pablo del Val, artistic director of Art Dubai, spoke to AAP on the opening day about the regional balance of participants at this year’s edition: “It’s all about how we can reflect the ways we live together. I was obsessed with the idea of interconnectivity—how things are linked, how we can help the visitor construct a narrative and how you can reflect the DNA of a place.”

Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum, which has served as a hub for cultural dialogue since the beginning of the fair, gathered scholars to discuss arts education, while the Modern Symposium—focused on 20th century art from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia—explored the influence of cities on local modernisms. The inaugural Curators Ideas Exchange Programme brought museum representatives from Tate in London, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou in Paris, New Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and more to experience Alserkal Avenue, Jameel Arts Centre, Sharjah Art Foundation—which is currently presenting Sharjah Biennial 14—and other local commercial and nonprofit art venues.

Here are some of the highlights from Art Dubai 2019:

Jhaveri Contemporary (Mumbai) presented SHEZAD DAWOOD’s mixed-media canvases Encroachment I – Jinnah, Encroachment II – Peace air drop, and Encroachment IV – Terrazzo (all 2018), as well as the spray-painted sculpture The American Center (2019), which all comment on the infiltration of American ideologies into urban Pakistani society during the Cold War. These pieces are part of the same series as Dawood’s Encroachments (2019), a virtual reality work commissioned for the concurrent Sharjah Biennial 14.

HAMRA ABBAS draws inspiration from the 17th century frescoes of Lahore and Sol LeWitt’s contemporary wall paintings to represent fictional gardens and waterfalls in her inlaid marble sculptures Flowers: Garden of Paradise 2, Waterfalls 1 and 2, Everyday Waterfalls 1 and 3, and Flowers: Garden of Paradise 1 (all 2019) at Canvas Gallery (Karachi).

GÖZDE İLKİN repurposes found domestic fabrics such as tablecloths, curtains and bedspreads in her stitched, painted and collaged wall hangings at Gypsum Gallery (Cairo). Pieces like Reverie of Space (2017), Visitors – V (2017), The Whispering (2017), Steady in Storm (2018) and Conscience 1 (2018) depict people with tuberous heads—which reference uprooted plant life—moving through imaginary landscapes and spatial voids.

856G Gallery (Mandaue) featured a solo booth of KRISTOFFER ARDEÑA’s gridded and circular abstractions painted on found advertising tarpaulins, and rolled-up rug stools with painted interiors that are hidden from sight. Ghost Painting (Cracked Category): 555 Sardines (2019) is based on the pattern of a woven retaso rug and the product packaging of 555 brand sardines, while Ghost Painting (Cracked Category): (painting will incorporate the name of the first collector) (2016) has been scored around everyday circular objects, such as bowls.

Lawrie Shabibi (Dubai) paired two generations of UAE artists who explore materiality: MOHAMED AHMED IBRAHIM, who was recently honored with a survey at the Sharjah Art Foundation, and SHAIKHA AL-MAZROU, who won the first Artist’s Garden commission at the Jameel Arts Centre in 2018. Ibrahim’s Sitting Man (2015) colorfully captures legendary UAE artist Hassan Sharif in repose, while Robot 4 (2017) and Fruit Basket 1 (2012) whimsically transform found objects with papier-mâché and paint. Al-Mazrou’s Intersecting Circles (2019) plays with formal ideas of abstraction, repetition and illusion.

Mixed-media paintings, a mechanical assemblage, and a moving painting by Iranian, Dubai-based artists and frequent collaborators RAMIN HAERIZADEH, ROKNI HAERIZADEH and HESAM RAHMANIAN were standouts at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde (Dubai). National May–August (2017–19) mixes blown-up pictures from a local newspaper with painted elements to create a giant head packed with mediated information. In their “Submersible” series (2016–17), pizza boxes are turned into readymade canvases to depict everyday life.

SAMIA HALABY showed her latest canvases capturing her inventive, abstract forms in a solo presentation at Ayyam Gallery (Dubai). The largest painting on view, titled Simultaneous Depth (2018), is representative of her style of layering repeated geometric shapes that keep the eye in continuous motion, illuminating Halaby’s abstract vision of traversing urban and rural landscapes.

Green Art Gallery (Dubai) had a mixed booth presenting SEHER SHAH and RANDHIR SINGH’s collaborative “Studies in Form,” a series of cyanotypes of architectural spaces, commissioned for the Dhaka Art Summit in 2018; American artist KATHLEEN RYAN’s gemstone, marble and glass bead sculpture Moldy Lemon (2019); and MARYAM HOSEINI’s Strangers From Right to Left #2 and #3, diagrammatic paintings of women suspended in abstract, painterly spaces.

Grosvenor Gallery (London) had two booths—one for Pakistani contemporary artists RASHEED ARAEEN and MOHAMMAD ALI TALPUR, and the other for a modern art group exhibition, “Calligraphic Abstraction in the School of Paris.” In the latter, SYED SADEQUAIN was featured with several paintings, including the large Four Figures Sitting in Paris (1967) and the red-and-black abstract painting Untitled (Seated Figure) (1964), along with DIA AZZAWI’s silkscreen print Nasheed Al Jassad (Bodily Anthem) Tel el Zaatar (1979) and gouache-on-paper Arabic Letter No. 1 (1980), as well as JEAN-MICHEL ATLAN’s curvilinear abstract canvas Composition (1958) and various items of related memorabilia.

Ota Fine Arts (Shanghai / Singapore / Tokyo) isolated a corner of its expansive group booth to highlight YAYOI KUSAMA’s colorful abstract painting All of Mankind Has Each and Every One of Them, Intoned Peace (2017) and botanical, red-and-white, dotted sculptures Flower C and Flower A (both 2018), alongside Tokyo-based artist NOBUAKI TAKEKAWA’s rhythmic, blue and white Wave Drawing (2013) painting.

RAYA KASSISIEH’s fabric paintings were a standout at Wadi Finan Art Gallery (Amman). The group of large-scale, stitched fabric-stretched works Erode 1 and 2 and Refract 1 and 2 (all 2018), which were juxtaposed with smaller pieces like Bow (2019), resemble aerial views of mountainous terrain and details of earth-toned topographical maps.

Experimenter (Kolkata) carved out a corner of its booth to present Bangladeshi artist AYESHA SULTANA’s sublime graphic-on-paper, five-part wall sculpture Untitled (2019). Commissioned to create a new work for the forthcoming Srihatta – Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet, Bangladesh, Sultana is interested in form and materiality, as well as her work’s relationship to the built environment.

Galerie Michael Janssen (Berlin) teamed up with Orbital Dago (Bandung) to present a group exhibition of works by European and South Asian artists, including Indonesian painter PIKO IABADIOU’s expressionistic abstractions Benturan Bentuk #1 (2019) and Fragile Wind (2019), alongside Belgian sculptor STIJN ANK’s bronze column 12.2014 (2018).

RAMAZAN CAN combines concrete and neon with traditional oriental carpets—which are woven by his family’s business in a small village near the Black Sea—to comment on his rapidly changing hometown. The framed rug with neon signage I am a Stranger of This Place (2018), concrete-and-fabric floor piece Cupboard/Attic III (2017), the pedestal-mounted I’m Neither on the Ground nor the Sky (2017), and Indigenization II Cupboard/Attic Series (2017), a concrete column pierced by a rug, represent his futile attempts to hold onto the past.