Electric yellow paint spreads across the floors of Lawrie Shabibi gallery in Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue, alongside contrasting peach pink walls, setting the tone for Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim’s solo show Embryonic Coat.
The Khor Fakkan-born artist, 60, is one of the UAE’s pioneering art figures, having been part of the Five, a group of conceptual artists — including Hassan Sharif, Hussain Sharif, Mohammed Kazem and Abdullah Al Saadi — who have been working alongside each other since the 1980s.
It’s a particularly glittering time for Ibrahim’s seasoned career; Embryonic Coat is running concurrently with his installation for the National Pavilion UAE at the 59th Venice Biennale. Titled Between Sunrise and Sunset, the work consists of a room-size papier mache sculpture constructed from 128 abstract and organic elements.
Scroll through the gallery below to see Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim's installation at the Venice Biennale
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Emirati artist Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim’s installation of 128 sculptures, Between Sunrise and Sunset, has opened at the Venice Biennale's National Pavilion UAE. All photos: Ismail Noor / National Pavilion UAE -
Arranged in a thick column in the cavernous Arsenale room, the tree-like sculptures are inspired by Ibrahim's hometown of Khorfakkan -
The forms remain the same but the colours change as one walks towards the back of the room, with beiges and taupes taking the place of formerly lurid shades -
Made of papier-mache, the objects seem painted but actually gain their colour from the paper used to create them -
Ibrahim mixed coloured sheaves of paper as a painter mixes paint, and also incorporated everyday, organic material from around him — leaves from trees in his garden in Khorfakkan, tobacco, tea, coffee, and even the cardboard packaging from toys which his grandchildren would save for him -
Curated by Maya Allison, executive director of NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, the exhibition presents a major new work by an Emirati artist -
Bright colours change into a more desolate landscape of blacks and whites as you walk through the installation -
The work, and the performative walk around it, affect the transition from day to night, as seen by the eye -
In some ways, the sculptures resemble trees and animals, but Ibrahim says they represent neither -
Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim: Between Sunrise and Sunset is now open to the public at the Venice Biennale and runs until November 27, 2022
Embryonic Coat is Ibrahim’s third solo exhibition at Lawrie Shabibi and is emblematic of the signature style, mediums and artistic “voice” he has developed over decades. It’s difficult not to recognise his work — his papier mache playgrounds filled with tree or cacti-like sculptures in bold, childlike hues, then translated on to painted canvases that begin to resemble abstract symbols or giant colouring books of runes. Ibrahim’s shows portray a singular artistic language, both between his works and then between those and his audiences. His is a focused and distinct constructed visual world.
Similar to the protective encasing or membrane formed around a seed or embryo, as outlined by the title Embryonic Coat, this show itself is a capsule of Ibrahim’s oeuvre, how it has progressed and evolved from birth to present.
But the title has more literal roots, too: while working on his Venice Biennale installation, which was massive in scale, Ibrahim spent more time in and around his home studio and its attached garden, which houses old trees, flower beds and potted plants. These organically became new points of inspiration for his art, manifesting in his painting series My Garden’s Details, where those potted plants morph into a central motif for the show. This pattern is repeated and rendered in Ibrahim’s visual language and transmuted over and over into new symbols in vivid hues, such as in the Symbols paintings and murals, or the vertical lines in his Lines works. The natural is essentially made abstract, decoded through Ibrahim’s perspective and then coded back into his work as something fresh and new, offering a heightened and more fun, quirky view of the everyday.
Ibrahim’s 3D work, the well-known papier mache sculptures, are wrought through that same process while building and expanding on the theme of Embryonic Coat. These recent works are the result of weeks of experimenting with a variety of quotidian materials, such as leaves, grass, tea, coffee and tobacco. He would mix these to produce more complex natural and neutral shades, using coloured or black and white paper. Similar to the Venice commission — although that displays a single work — the floor space at Lawrie Shabibi is adorned, like flower beds or elegant gardens, with Ibrahim’s different sculptures. Some look like playground apparatus or toys, others more directly interact with his potted plant motifs on the walls, while elsewhere, the audience might see flowers, robots, combs, trees or animals.
You could say there is a sense of repetitiveness across Ibrahim’s body of work. But this critique would suggest a lesser effort in approaching and engaging with the artist’s visual language. Part of Embryonic Coat and Ibrahim’s artistic exuberance is sifting through the regimented order inherent to his repetition and letting the differences take control of our interpretations.
Ibrahim has one language in which he introduces thousands of tiny new phrases with each work or each reproduction of a symbol or motif, with merely a slight change in colour or form or brushstroke or bending. However similar the works look on the surface, there are idiosyncrasies and specificities peppered in everywhere, some more immediately apparent than others.
It’s like breaking the top of a creme brulee with a spoon to reveal whole new textures of flavour underneath.
To interact with the work of Ibrahim is to practice a more refined sense of attention, to lean in, to engage with the smallest of differences and see a new picture or idea emerge, and Embryonic Coat embodies this. As a viewer, it can feel refreshing when we are so sensitised to homogeneity, to sameness, to mass-produced products and markets. Our numbed approach to objects and images is thoroughly challenged in Ibrahim’s vibrant artscape.
Embryonic Coat runs until July 16 at Lawrie Shabibi, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
Dubai exhibition Eyes Wide Shut explores female trauma and healing — in pictures
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Firetti Contemporary gallery at Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue has is holding its first all-female exhibition titled Eyes Wide Shut. Curated by Celine Azem, Mara Firetti and Oceane Sailly, the show features 10 women artists of different generations and levels. All photos: Firetti Contemporary -
Firetti Contemporary is known primarily for its displays of digital and abstract art. -
The exhibition's 10 artists are from the UAE, Iran, Armenia, Ukraine, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Kuwait. -
Artist Negin Fallah next to her works. -
Artist Amina Yahia with her work 'Ya Aghla Ism Fi El Wogood'. -
The centrepiece of Eyes Wide Shut is Kuwaiti artist Alymamah Rashed’s 'My eye splits your love to hold us closer to our depths (I will meet you there)', a floor-to-ceiling watercolour occupying the gallery’s back wall. -
Emirati artist Khawla Almarzooqi’s canvases are surreal meditations on the emotions that are caused by the constrictions placed on the female mind and body. -
'The clothed Maja' by Emirati artist Khawla Almarzooqi. -
Lebanese-Armenian artist Annie Kurkdjian was inspired by her experiences of civil war in Beirut and her grandmother’s traumatic memories of the Armenian genocide. -
An untitled work by Lebanese-Armenian artist Annie Kurkdjian. -
Palestinian artist Qamar Abdulmalik, who lives in Saudi Arabia, uses the fantastical to comment on politics. -
Flush with images of passports, Qamar Abdulmalik's artworks exaggerate the absurdity of an undocumented immigrant’s quotidian challenges. -
One of the collages by Palestinian artist Qamar Abdulmalik. -
Having spent her early childhood in Kharkiv, Ukraine, before relocating to Kuwait, multidisciplinary artist Amani Althuwani melds childhood fairytales with Kuwaiti marriage traditions and rituals. -
Collectively, Amani AlThuwani's works mourn the catastrophic destruction of a place that holds her earliest memories, and how her own children may not be able to experience them. -
Maria Shapranova’s mixed-media collages use Ukrainian symbolism in pop art-style to portray the resilience of Ukrainian women. -
Maria Shapranova uses bold scarlet shades to evoke blood — literally and metaphorically — as well as colours of the Ukrainian flag as backdrops for cleverly cut images. -
Egyptian painter and visual artist Amina Yahia. -
Emirati visual artist Afra Al Suwaidi. -
Ukrainian artist Maria Shapranova. -
Syrian artist and architect Sawsan Al Bahar. -
Kuwaiti artist Alymamah Rashed. -
Lebanese-Armenian artist Annie Kurkdjian. -
Iranian artist Negin Fallah. -
Palestinian artist Qamar Abdulmalik. -
Ukraine-born Kuwaiti artist Amani AlThuwani. -
Emirati artist Khawla Almarzooqi. -
The curators of Eyes Wide Shut, from left to right, Oceane Sailly, Mara Firetti and Celine Azem.
