Painters and sculptors take to the art of intaglio
Meem Gallery hosts an exhibition of works from artists who stepped away from painting and sculpture to record the problems of contemporary life in a different way, writes Suzy Sikorski
The process of printmaking in visual art has been experimented with since the early 20th century. Painters and sculptors hoping to diversify into printmaking played with dimensions, colours and materials while continuing to address the movement, repetition and sequential order in our lives.
Robert Rauschenberg’s mixed-media prints and Andy Warhol’s lithographs are part of this conversation. However, artists from the Arab world, within and outside the West, have also taken part.
In its third iteration of Arab
Prints - the previous exhibitions were staged in 2016 and 2008 - Meem Gallery offers a selection of rare earlier works by post-war artists who were dedicated to experimenting with their arts and fostering them in their communities.
These artists addressed part of a larger metaphysical idea of the human condition – one of existence, intimacy, chance and order in the post-war period in the Arab world.
“Printmaking is often an overlooked medium, whether or not the overlooking takes place in the West or the East,” says Meagan Horsman, business development director of the Dubai-based gallery. “For us, these works are important as they highlight pioneer artists’ work, often artists who are better known for their painting or sculpture. By exhibiting under-researched and overlooked areas within Arab artists’ oeuvre, we are also hoping through the creation of a publication that we can assist with raising the profile of Arab printmaking.”
Complete with a selection of artworks and accompanying old exhibition catalogues dating back to the 1960s, this show aims to contextualise the featured artists as cultural producers and recorders of the problems faced in contemporary life, during both the violent and peaceful post-war years in Sudan, Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq.
The artists include Assadour, Munira Al Kazi, Ahmed Morsi, Ibrahim Salahi, Hashem Samarchi and the late Ismail Fattah.
“For me, the works of Munira Al Kazi are really quite an important addition to the exhibition. There aren’t as many female modernist artists in the Arab world as male, and certainly printmakers within that group are fewer and farther between. I love how her use of monochrome works so well with such dynamic, vibrant subject matter and composition,” Horsman admits.
Islamic, African, Arab and western symbols pervade the prints and are used as a map to understand how the human condition is explored by the artist. Coupled with the efficiency and rapidity of printmaking, the works displayed narrate the everyday problems of humankind. Symbols, colours and rigid lines delineate the sorrow and the horrors of mankind, alienation, the imaginations of the mind, and the bodily form.
On entering the gallery, the works of Morsi are a testament to his contemplative gaze and perspective on human relations, regardless of time, class or culture.
Crowned Head, (1999) appears as an abstracted head without a brain with a single dilated eye pupil pulsating at the viewer. His Untitled (1994) smaller prints feature colourless figures and horses with eyes without pupils.
If Morsi’s nightmarish figures make the viewer uneasy, Ibrahim Salahi’s triptych,
The Resurrection (2009), has hundreds of squinting eyes in every crevice of the work amid an entire suffering community, naked and chained, left either to sit to ponder their condition or to hold up their arms in desperation. Seen within a larger narrative of the human journey, Assadour’s beautifully decorated works embody the movement of a person navigating time and space, depicting the process of uprooting and reconstructing space.
Testament to techniques and imagery used, the artists were trained inside and outside of their home countries by some of the most highly respected teachers and fine art schools in the world.
Each developed their niche in printmaking – etching, lithographs, dry point, and mezzotint – while establishing their painting practice.
Egyptian artist Morsi studied English literature at the University of Alexandria, mixing with the arts and literary circles of Alexandria, Cairo, Baghdad and later in New York, where he now lives.
Lebanese artist Assadour studied under the renowned Lebanese-Armenian painter Paul Guiragossian, moved to study art in Italy in the 1960s and then at the École Nationale Supérieure des BeauxArts in Paris under engraver Lucien Coutaud.
Born in India with Saudi-Kuwaiti origins, Munira Al Kazi studied at London’s Central School of Art and Design in 1961 and was part of the inaugural exhibition of the Sultan Gallery in Kuwait in 1969. She later moved to Ibiza, Spain, where she continued with printmaking.
Although most of these artists are painters and sculptors, their prints continue to evince the tangible feel of human character. Many appear in similar iterations, however, where the artist’s main concern is to trace the relation in space between abstracted subjects and experiment with form and process while doing this.
This exhibition is the third volume of a proposed five-part series. As volumes I-III focused on modernist artists, editions IV and V will take a look at contemporary artists using print as a medium in the Arab world.