Up the craggy heights of Hatta, a young Mohammed Kazem would stop by a desert shrub and, squinting against the sun, he’d observe how the light would meet its spindly leaves. He’d spend the next few hours there, sketching.
In Al Qusais, he’d find wilderness erupting around sewers, set up an easel and paint the scenes as Claude Monet painted the poplars along the River Epte.
“It was how I learnt to see what was in front of me,” the Emirati artist tells The National. “I did a lot of mistakes, but it is how I learnt to convert the three-dimensional into the two-dimensional, also paying attention to perspective, reading light, shadows, measuring these things by eye.”
Works from this early experimental period of Kazem’s career are on display at Gallery Isabelle. The exhibition is titled Scenes from the 90s and runs until September 15.
Today, Kazem has become known for his multidisciplinary approach, often taking a single idea and testing it across contexts and materials.
Directions is the most famous example of this. The series has taken various forms, from photographs taken on land and sea to a colossal installation at Expo City Dubai that rises in a twist of steel numerals – laser-cut co-ordinates – with light emanating from within. Kazem has utilised GPS co-ordinates as an artistic medium in itself.
He has tossed panels imprinted with co-ordinates into the open waters, mounted vinyls with co-ordinates on the windows of NYU Abu Dhabi and scribbled co-ordinates on stone blocks in a project in Bodh Gaya in India. Each iteration of Directions recalls a personal formative experience of being hurled overboard, of being lost at sea until a friend with a GPS managed to retrace the boat’s trip.
Yet, despite their experimental nature, the works all share an astute consideration of composition and colour, sensibilities that Kazem developed in the 1990s while painting landscapes. This was a crucial period for him as a young artist, he says. He had already familiarised himself with the seminal movements in art history and was learning to break out of the mould to find his own reach and identity as an artist.
The paintings in Scenes from the 90s show this litheness. The larger works show scenes in Hatta, painted with impressionistic reverie. Purple, feverish dabs of paint make up the foliage. The body of water underneath is depicted in paler, pinkish hues, layered in thin horizontal streaks. Another work renders a similar scene in black, dark green and white.
The adjoining works are smaller, their scenes abstracted. They could easily be mistaken for the works of another artist. Here, the landscapes are presented in splodges of colour that feather into darker edges. The final few works, meanwhile, show Kazem’s experiments with scratching on paper, adding terrain-like textures to the surface with scissors.
Kazem’s works are being exhibited in the artist’s room at Gallery Isabelle, following another solo exhibition. In Plain Sight – also running until September 15 – features works by Alia Zaal.
The paintings depict flora from across the country with a slightly abstracted allure. The leaves of mangroves drip down the canvas in rippling greens. Shadowy palm fronds are patterned against vibrant pinks. And there are smaller works with dabs of dark blue and grey that allude to the brushstrokes of the Impressionists. Much like Kazem’s earlier work, Zaal was in fact inspired by Claude Monet after a residency in the French painter’s former home in Giverny.
“She has her own way of painting,” Kazem says. “I used thickly-layered paint, and hers are thinner and softer in hues.”
Kazem owes a lot of his early experimentation, he says, to the mentorship of Hassan Sharif, a key figure in the UAE contemporary art scene.
“He organised my first solo show in 1987,” Kazem says. “It was at the Emirates Fine Arts Society. It was in a small room in a villa that still exists in Al Kuwait Roundabout in Sharjah. They held seminars, talks and exhibitions in that small room.
“I showed there my studies of Van Gogh, of Cezanne, paintings influenced by Picasso and Georges Braque, by Fauvism and Impressionism. He provided me with materials, as well as essays to read. The idea was how to take the harmony of colours and to take it to a different scale.”
It was Sharif, Kazem says, who goaded him out of his early influences and encouraged him to experiment with the material itself. “He told me to go beyond Claude Monet. I was so sad. I wondered why he was saying this to me,” he recalls, chuckling.
The advice was well-aimed as it inspired Kazem to begin scratching into his artworks. Beyond their textural effect, he found that the scratches coaxed gradient-like tones from a single colour.
“I started doing small samples,” he says. “I had this small book I would carry around with me, and I’d show it to Hassan. He encouraged it. And I started experimenting, taking the work on a larger scale. He pointed out that the work was becoming an installation, a sculpture.”
Kazem showed several artworks that utilised this technique in the 1995 Sharjah Biennial, which was held at the red-and-white tent of the old Expo Centre. The works were not well-received at first.
“I showed some five, six works,” he says. “Some of them were on the floor, some of them on the wall. Some of them rolled, and so on. That was a big step in my practice. I received a lot of criticism, actually, from even famous Arab artists.”
Kazem nevertheless continued to develop the technique in several subsequent artworks, including Scratches on Paper (2014) exhibited at the Sharjah Biennial. The sprawling, 140cm by 1000cm work that bears the scratches in a musical, lilting form. The works became more appreciated, with pieces from the series now featured in prestigious collections such as the Barjeel Art Foundation. Kazem is also still producing art using the scratch technique, including a forthcoming body of work that ponders on the musicality of the form.
Kazem fondly recalls his early years of experimenting with Sharif. He stresses how influential and supportive the Emirati artist was in helping a new generation of artists develop in the UAE.
He recalls how the official transformed his Ministry of Youth and Sports office into a studio for artists, giving them the freedom to experiment and think beyond painting and sculpture.
As Kazem developed his craft, the country at large was also expanding its cultural infrastructure. Biennials, art fairs, institutions and gallery spaces were popping up. However, there were many teething pains.
“For example, the Sharjah Biennial that began in 1993, and a lot of people were participating from around the world, but there were no curators,” he says. “We’d receive works and hang them randomly, without curators, or an art director, without a team.”
Newspapers were also a critical battleground, as artists wrote essays lambasting each others’ works, often published on the same page.
“Hassan was archiving all these materials,” Kazem says. “He was very intelligent. Besides his own artwork, he kept essays, encouraged us to archive our artworks. I’ve lost several artworks, but thanks to him, I have a record of them.
“When he travelled to the UK, he also brought back art books for us. At the time, there were only two art books at the Central Library of Dubai, one on Picasso and another on Cezanne.”
Of course, the local art scene has expanded greatly in the past three decades. Besides a packed annual calendar of art events and programmes, there are also several seminal art institutions, both local and global, that are bolstering the nation’s creative output.
“I’m very proud to where we’ve reached,” Kazem says. “Many things were missing, like art education. It didn’t exist. Now, new collectors have come up who want to invest in art. The people and society has changed as a result of the art fairs. The Sheikha Salama Foundation, the 421 platform are encouraging and supporting artists based in the UAE, helping them join MFA programmes abroad. NYU Abu Dhabi has an MFA and a proper budget for an arts programme.”
Yet, while this infrastructure, Kazem says, provides a fertile creative ground, it is up to individual artists to develop and sustain their craft, working studiously and seriously.
“We can’t say we are lacking anything,” he says. “The government is really supporting. The Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, for instance, has a budget of Dh35million for commissioned works. It is incredible. Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, also, began many years ago, building their curatorial team and an acquisitions team. Artists should engage with this growth. They aren’t building these beautiful structures for their own sake. We have to interact with that.
“Artists have to continuously work. You can’t work just for an event. You have to work every day. I come to the studio every day. If you don’t practise, you keep gaps between your ideas and your practice.”
