Tabari Artspace presented works from eight leading artists from the region at the Art Dubai art fair.
Featured artists included:
Adam Henein, one of Egypt’s most famous artists, born in 1929. The revered artist completed his training as a sculptor at the Cairo Faculty of Fine Arts in 1953. Since then, he devoted his life to the art of sculpture and color drawing, following traditional Egyptian techniques.
Adel El-Siwi, born in Beheira, Egypt in 1952. El-Siwi focused his work on interior scape, aiming to give traditional still life objects pride and powerful presence. El Siwi chose to use simple themes including flower pots, palm trees, and camels. He strongly believed that the more limited the means, the stronger the potential of expression and refused to use any other medium of painting other than paper or canvas.
Omar El-Nagdi, born in Cairo, Egypt in 1931. His paintings featured expressive textures, colors, and Egyptian symbolic design. His work displayed life into timeless symbolism that went beyond mere decoration to discover a mixture of humanist and mystic sensibilities. Poetic and sensitive, each piece allowed him to incorporate Pharaonic and Islamic cultures based on his thoughts as a modern man.
Yousef Ahmad from Qatar, renowned as one of the Middle East’s true gems. He celebrated the spiritual dimension of calligraphy with the creative flourish of abstract art. "In Qatar, we did not have the mountains like in the UAE or the greenery you see in Bahrain. We had flat deserts and bright blue skies. That was essentially what was reflected in my works, which had predominantly dusty colors," the artist said, while bringing Arabic calligraphy to the foreground, with local realities forming his backdrop.
Hussein Madi, born in Lebanon in 1938. He was a tireless and prolific artist who spent a lifetime producing countless works in a variety of media. A painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Madi was considered to be one of the Arab world’s foremost artists. Madi’s joyful experiments in color and form resulted in a unique body of work that related to modern artists like Matisse and Picasso, as well as the principles of divine harmony that informed the abstract designs of Islamic art.
Mohammed Abla, an Egyptian-born artist, gained fame for his unique style of blending European influences into traditional Egyptian ways of painting. At a very young age, Abla knew he wanted to be an artist. He earned a scholarship to Europe through his first solo exhibition held at the Spanish Cultural Institute in Cairo. He spent seven fruitful years in Europe after graduating from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria. His continuous traveling brought him broad exposure to the international art scene, a chance to study and exhibit in European galleries.
Paul Guiragossian, from Lebanon, born in 1926. His career focused on painting scenes of daily life, his family, and the social environment in the slums of Beirut: poor families, crying children, beggars on the sidewalks, hungry tramps, and corpses on their deathbed. He painted with shocking realism: thick black lines, winding, twisting, breaking, bodies throbbing with suffering.