#modernarabart

[anneka-at-home]

Amazing images from an article published in, Finoon Arabiah, featuring artist textiles that were commissioned for the Jeddah airport, I believe around 1980-81. Look at the bank of telephones! Top: Saudi artist Abdulhalim Radwi’s design. Below: Iraqi artist Dia Azzawi’s design. This was a pan-Arab entrepreneurial episode that was overseen by Stelio Scamanga. Other mural commissions came from Mohamed Melehi (Morocco), Ahmed Shibrain (Sudan), Farid Belkahia (Morocco), Wajih Nahle (Lebanon), Nja Mahdaoui (Tunisia), and Said Akl (Lebanon), among others. The Moroccan artists, as was often the case, experimented with other media for their commissions.

[anneka-at-home]

Discovery in 1960s print media: an excellent photograph of Syrian artist Fateh al-Moudarres, printed amid a feature in Mid East journal (November/December 1968) on artists working in Beirut, a “Paris of the Middle East.” The feature’s texts are mostly drawn from interviews conducted by a student named Mary Alice Lee, who was then attending AUB. But al-Moudarres seems to have supplied a text he had initially written for a 1963 exhibition at Gallery One. It’s a key statement on his thinking about the ethics of his painting, including his use of sand and mixed media on the surface of his work. I have long struggled to translate it, so it is a delight to encounter this very good translation into English, completed by an unknown translator for the journal! One small change I find interesting: in the Arabic, in 1963, he is saying that the paintings show or represent his optimistic side. In the version printed in English in 1968, agency is more firmly placed with the artist as commander of magical relationships between images and spectators.

[anneka-at-home]

Click on the title ^

A .pdf version of the whole of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, eds. Anneka Lenssen, Nada Shabout, and Sarah Rogers (New York: MoMA, 2018), now available for download. 

[p21gallery]

Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara As P21 Gallery mission is to promote art and culture related to the Arab world, we will be featuring Arab artists on our social media platforms. This post is put together by Adela Foo, an intern at the P21 Gallery. Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara (b.1933) is a self-taught Palestinian artist who lives and works in Amman, Jordan. Deeply impacted by the events of the Palestinian Nakba and his own experiences of expulsion from his village of Al-Dawayima, Zarara’s work seeks to visualize the existence of a potent Palestinian identity by recreating scenes of daily life drawn from personal memories. Zarara’s work falls under the category of “painted reliefs.” Using simple materials such as glue and sawdust, the artist carefully sculpts and paints various narrative scenes ranging from the triumph during battle to village weddings and Ramadan nights. The greatest strength in Zarara’s “painted reliefs” lies in their ability to function as a visual archive of Palestinian identity. Arguably, Zarara’s creations are representative of a community preserving and producing its own narrative history. Zarara has participated in multiple exhibitions both within the region and beyond in the international arts arena. For example, his art was displayed in the Sharjah Biennial (2015) and also in the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, Texas (2003). More information on the artist is available from his own social media page included here: https://abdulhaymosallam.wordpress.com/about/ #AbdulHayMosallamZarara #PalestinianArtist #MENA #ModernArabArt #arabartist #arabart #p21gallery #AdelaFoo https://www.instagram.com/p/BxfL4Dtlee5/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=tiuxzglccpfy

[gianlucascribanofan]

#pittoresabbatino #giambattistasabbatino #portrait #orientalismo #etiopianart #modernarabart #oilpainting