Art from the Arabian Peninsula
"Art from the Arabian Peninsula"
by Sally Bland - The Jordan Times
February 28, 2000

During February, Darat Al Funun featured art from the Arabian Peninsula. The four artists displaying oil paintings - Sheikh Rashid Al Khalifa, Abdul Raheem Shareef and Ibrahim Bou Saad of Bahrain, plus Yousef Ahmad of Qatar - opted for an abstract mode of expression in bold colours on large canvases.

Alongside these, the graphics by Sami Mohammad of Kuwait appeared as a radical departure. Besides being much smaller, his pieces were painstakingly concrete and detailed applying the fine lines of oriental filigree and geometric design to a very modern picture of human anguish with a stark precision seldom seen in contemporary Arab artwork.

Yet another completely different style was seen in the large pencil drawings of Ahmad Baqir on textured paper. The images were traditional motifs indigenous to the artist's native Bahrain - date palms, basket weaving, the sea and boats - but the style and presentation were modern. Yemeni artist Fuad Futaih also combined old and new, building on traditional designs rendered in bright colours but framing his images in a modern way.

The works of three of the artists clearly showed Western influence, Omani painter Rabiha Mahmoud's oils of female figures in shaded colours were close to impressionism, while the multimedia works and the 3-D structures of U.A.E artists Hassan Shareef and Momammad Kadhim and Faisal Al Samra of Saudi Arabia, were obviously inspired by newer Western trends. The overall impression of the exhibit was one of diversity, coming from countries that many people tend to lump together mistakenly, as rather monolithic.