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 Feb.,
28, 2000, (Jordan Times),
"Art from the Arabian Peninsula",
by
Sally Bland
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.
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