#Barjeel Art Foundation

[arthistoryanimalia]

Born #OTD, prolific Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine (12 Dec 1931 -9 Nov 1998), whose 1st exhibition in Paris in 1957 (at age 16) caught the eye of the likes of Pablo Picasso and Andre Breton. Both birds and fish show up often in her art!

Baya in Vogue France February 1948

Algeria 2008 commemorative stamps minature sheet: Works of Art from the National Museum, Baya Mahieddine

Woman with Two Peacocks and Aquarium, 1968 Watercolour & gouache on paper, 66 x 92 cm Barjeel Art Foundation collection

[kreativekopf]

Stop the invasion, stop the genocide NOW!

Artwork details:

Thuraya Al Baqsami (Kuwaiti, b. 1952), ‘NO TO THE INVASION’ (1990), lino-cut print, 40 x 30 cm. Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation @barjeelart.

[thunderstruck9]

Marie Hadad (Lebanese, 1889-1973), Untitled, c.1930s. Oil on canvas, 60 x 40 cm. Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

[tomafome]

Rafic Charaf (Baalbek, Lebanon, 1932 – Beirut, Lebanon, 2003), Palestinian Woman, 1966. Oil on masonite board, 71 x 55 cm. Photo courtesy of Barjeel Art Foundation.

From A Century in Flux: Highlights from the Barjeel Art Foundation, a long-term exhibition at the Sharjah Art Museum featuring a selection of key modernist paintings, sculptures and mixed media artworks from the this collection.

↘︎ https://www.barjeelartfoundation.org/exhibitions/a-century-in-flux/

[drsonnet]

Faten Alfred Tubasi

Born 1960, Jerusalem, Palestine

"Heroic Act," 1984

Oil on canvas, 200 × 180 cm

#FatenTubasi

#FatenToubasi

Source:

Barjeel Art Foundation

فاتن الفرد طوباسي

مواليد ١٩٦٠، القدس، فلسطين

عمل فذ، ١٩٨٤

ألوان زيتية على قماش، ٢٠٠ × ١٨٠ سم

#فاتن_طوباسي

#FatenToubasi

[abwwia]

Menhat Helmy, Space Exploration, Universe, 1973, Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation

[somehowwow]

Fatigued Ten Horses Converse with Nothing by Iraqi artist Kadhim Hayder, 1965

Courtesy of Barjeel Art Foundation

[ubu507]

Ibrahim Ismail, “Untitled,” 1965. Oil on canvas. At the Wallach Art Gallery.

Credit…via Barjeel Art Foundation

[beljar]

Her gaze is haunting, and she appears almost ghost like. Her somber figure embodies the suffering and hardship experienced by people during the Algerian War for independence.

Graffiti on the wall behind her reads "OAS" and "FLN", standing for "Organisation Armée Secrète" (secret army organization) and "Front de Libération Nationale" (the national liberation front)

Femme et Mur (Woman and Wall) by M'hammed Issiakhem

[viajeroseneltiempo]

(EN) Historical item of the week⌛️ The woman and the wall This painting, created in 1978 by Algerian artist Mohammed Issiakhem, depicts Algeria's anti-colonial resistance against France in the 1960s. The woman, dressed in Amazigh or Berber attire, stands in a sad and defiant pose in front of a wall painted with initials of the Algerian resistance armies such as the OAS and the FLN. The painting is in the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjab, United Arab Emirates.

(ES) Objeto histórico de la semana⌛️ La mujer y la pared Esta pintura creada en 1978 por el artista argelino Mohammed Issiakhem, representa la resistencia anticolonial de Argelia en contra de Francia en la década de los 60. La mujer vestida con un atuendo Amazigh o bereber, se encuentra en una pose triste y desafiante frente a una pared pintada con siglas de los ejércitos de resistencia argelinos como el OAS y el FLN. La pintura esta en la Fundación de Arte Barjeel en Sharjab, Emiratos Árabes.

[santistebanmoreno]

AMER, GHADA

Ghada Amer es una artista plástica, afincada en Nueva York. Sus obras son principalmente pinturas bordadas realizadas desde la perspectiva de un trabajo tradicional de la mujer, como es la costura, con el que ella denuncia los roles y los estereotipos.

Nacimiento: 1963 (edad 58 años), El Cairo, Egipto

You Are A Lady, 2015, acrylic and embroidery on cambas, 72x64 in.

Hend, 2017, acrylic, embroidery and gel.

Chantal, 2018

Sculpture, Ceramic

90 x 125 x 26 cm. (35.4 x 49.2 x 10.2 in.)

Princesses, 2005

71 9/10 × 64 in

182.5 × 162.5 cm

https://www.ghadaamer.com

[thunderstruck9]

Ibrahim El-Salahi (Sudanese, 1930), The Last Sound, 1964. Oil on canvas, 121.5 x 121.5 cm. Barjeel Art Foundation

[whileiamdying]

How the Arabic Alphabet Inspired Abstract Art

Installation view of “Taking Shape: Abstraction From the Arab World, 1950s–1980s” at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. From left, Ibrahim El-Salahi’s ”The Last Sound,” 1964; two untitled pieces by Shakir Hassan al-Said from around 1970 (top) and 1963 (bottom); and al-Said’s 1983 work ”Al-Muntassirun (The Victorious).”Credit...Ibrahim El-Salahi/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London; Nick Papananias

At the Grey Gallery, it’s as if you’re inhabiting the artist’s own brush as it hesitates between writing and drawing.

by Will Heinrich Published Feb. 20, 2020 Updated Feb. 23, 2020

There’s something thrilling about the extreme flexibility of the Arabic alphabet. The graphic simplicity of its swoops, loops and dots means that it can be made to look like almost anything, from a rearing horse to a pixelated television screen.

Arab states have been increasingly visible on the international art scene in the last few years, pouring wealth into auction houses and building museums like they’re going out of style. But the art of their own larger cultural sphere still hasn’t gotten its fair share of all that new attention — at least not in New York.

It’s too big a topic to cover in a single show, but you’ll find an exciting introduction in “Taking Shape: Abstraction From the Arab World, 1950s-1980s” at Grey Art Gallery at New York University. Focusing on the tumultuous few decades of decolonization and nation-building, the curators Suheyla Takesh, of the Barjeel Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates, and Lynn Gumpert of the Grey have brought together 90-odd prints and paintings by Arab, Berber, Jewish and other artists from Algeria to Iraq.

Most of these artists had some European or American training, and alongside unusual sandy palettes and a few unexpected details, you’ll see plenty of approaches that look familiar: lucid colors à la Josef Albers, crimson bursts of impasto similar to early Abstract Expressionism. But unlike European artists, they also have an alphabet with an ancient history in visual art — and this gives their abstraction a very different effect.

For Madiha Umar, who was born in Syria and studied at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, Arabic letters were a vehicle of secular identity, a way of making Western painting her own. The bustling blue and red swooshes in an untitled 1978 watercolor clearly recall letter forms as well as ancient Mesopotamian crescent moons. But the way the crescents are organized, back and forth across the paper’s edges with an almost narrative motion, makes you think of writing, too.

An untitled 1978 watercolor by Madiha Umar recalls Arabic letter forms as well as ancient Mesopotamian crescent moons.Credit...Barjeel Art Foundation

An untitled piece by the Egyptian artist Omar el-Nagdi from 1970 shares its form with the first letter of the Arabic alphabet.Credit...Barjeel Art Foundation

But the letters retain the religious associations of scripture for the Egyptian artist Omar el-Nagdi, particularly alif, a sharp vertical stroke like a lightning bolt that starts the alphabet and the Arabic word for God and occasionally stands in for the numeral one. A cloud of these overlapping vertical marks, some long and jagged, some slightly curved, in an untitled off-white painting from 1970 offers a mystical vision of divinity immanent in all the world’s separate beings. It’s also a mystical vision of painting itself, one in which every brush stroke retains its infinite potential even as they all merge into a single picture.

Shakir Hassan al-Said’s “Al-Muntassirun” (“The Victorious”), from 1983, a multimedia on panel work that looks like a section of much-abused wall, raises the shimmering ambiguity of el-Nagdi’s alifs to an even dizzier height. A black stripe across the bottom of the otherwise gray rectangle gestures discreetly at the notion of a horizon, while a series of grids and scribbles above it feel as spontaneous as graffiti. Floating over all this, in what looks like black spray paint, is one chic loop. A mark so simple that it can stand for the idea of mark-making in general, it also happens to be the letter waw, which means “and.”

An untitled oil by Wijdan from 1970. “Each little dash, like a letter, insists on its granular distinctness, whatever their overall effect,” our critic says.Credit...Barjeel Art Foundation

Red, blue, orange and black lines scraped into another off-white surface are crowded with vertical dashes like so many sutures in an untitled 1977 oil by Wijdan, the Jordanian princess who signs paintings with her given name. Each little dash, like a letter, insists on its granular distinctness, whatever their overall effect. The Palestinian scholar Kamal Boullata added high-concept verbal content to cool but gorgeous silk-screens, like the 1983 “La Ana Illa Ana” (There Is No “I” but “I”), a riff on the Muslim credo “There is no God but God.” Working in the 1960s, the Lebanese artist Saliba Douaihy painted with bright colors and sharp lines. But in two small canvases included here, he pushed almost all the action toward the edges — like Madiha Umar’s watercolor, they unmistakably recall the irregular vertical movements of cursive writing.

Because you read letters and images differently, all these marks that look like letters but aren’t quite legible trigger a buoyant feeling of open-ended possibility. It’s as if you’re inhabiting the artist’s own brush as it hesitates between writing and drawing. At its best, as in Al Said’s “Al-Muntassirun,” this feeling stands in for and encompasses so many contrasts — local versus pan-Arab identity, civil versus religious society — that a single canvas becomes an open portal to the infinite.

Kamal Boullata’s elegant silk-screens (center wall) push the Arabic alphabet to the precipice of illegible — but you can see, all the way right, the decisive word la, or no. Credit...Nick Papananias

“Les Miroirs Rouges” (“Red Mirrors”), 1965, by the Moroccan artist Ahmed Cherkaoui.Credit...Barjeel Art Foundation

Jilali Gharbaoui’s “Composition,” from 1969. His paintings, like those of Cherkaoui, are inspired not by Arabic itself but by the North African Tifinagh alphabet.Credit...Barjeel Art Foundation

Fittingly enough, it’s the Moroccans Ahmed Cherkaoui and Jilali Gharbaoui who wield this potential to its most electric effect with paintings inspired not by Arabic itself but by the North African Tifinagh alphabet. Glowing spots of color, in Cherkaoui’s “Alea” and “Les Miroirs Rouges,” are divided by the thick black or rosy lines of a complex crisscross pattern similar to the Tifinagh letter yaz, which appears on the Amazigh (or Berber) flag. The effect is to overload your eyes, as if the blank paper under this review had come alive with a blaring message of its own.

Gharbaoui’s searing 1969 “Composition,” meanwhile, uses heavy black loops and bends to separate impastoed explosions of unmixed yellow and white that look like eggs hot off some heavenly griddle. All the ambiguities remain — is it a letter or a drawing? Is it figurative or abstract? Do those bursts of red express joy or despair? But somehow Gharbaoui made them as solid as rock.

Taking Shape: Abstraction From the Arab World, 1950s-1980s

Through April 4. Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square East, Manhattan; 212-998-6780, greyartgallery.nyu.edu.

[don-lichterman]

Naziha Salim, iconic Iraqi artist, educator & author on Google Doodle

Naziha Salim, iconic Iraqi artist, educator & author on Google Doodle

Google doodle on April 23, 2022, to celebrate Iraqi artist, educator and author, Naziha Salim. She was a painter, professor and one of the most influential artists in Iraq’s contemporary art scene. Her work often depicts rural Iraqi women and peasant life through bold brush strokes and vivid colors. On this day in 2020, Naziha Salim was spotlighted by the Barjeel Art Foundation in their…

[abwwia]

Mariam Abdel, Aleem's Clinic, 1958

Collection of Barjeel Art Foundation

[vsthepomegranate]

If Ye Are Grateful, I Will Add More (Favours) Unto You (c. 1960s)

by Ahmed Shibrain