HASSAN SHARIF: I AM THE SINGLE WORK ARTIST, 2021
Emirati artist Hassan Sharif (1951-2016) is considered one of the most influential artists in the Arab world today; he created a work of astonishing variety. Come and discover at MAMC + the exhibition I am the single work artist ( I am the artist of a unique work ): drawings, performances and experiments marked by conceptual art respond to the accumulations, cutouts, weaving of objects gleaned from the markets, sometimes deployed in monumental installations.
Artist, teacher, critic, Hassan Sharif contributes to changing the artistic landscape of his country to free it from traditional calligraphy. For four decades, he developed a large body of work: drawings, paintings, performances, sculptures and installations. Contrary to this abundant production, the title of the exhibition ( I am the single work artist - I am the artist of a unique work ) suggests that this set must be understood as a single gesture conceived in time and repetition.
Hassan Sharif's practice evolves in an economic and social context disrupted by the discovery of oil, its marketing in 1958 and the creation of the United Arab Emirates in 1971. His work is marked by the accelerated transformation of Dubai, then a modest territory, into a luxury megalopolis. He criticizes a forced modernization over the course of his cartoons published until 1979, when he concentrated on his artistic practice. His London training opens his gaze on British constructivist art, minimal art and Fluxus, whose influences he skilfully combines. His performances in the Hatta desert in the early 1980s are among the first conceptual gestures in the Gulf: jumping, throwing a stone, recording a rock, disappearing behind a dune ... Photographs,
Organizing ephemeral and subversive exhibitions with the Atelier Al Mureijah collective, he gradually took an interest in junk materials and objects, which he found in increasing quantities on the markets. Proceeding by accumulations, cuts, braiding, assemblies, he develops a major part of his work which he describes as "urban archeology". From the 2000s, when his installations became monumental, he resumed his pictorial practice, which he embellished with the same objects from everyday life. The grotesque style and the expressionist touch illustrate otherwise, with realism, a consumer society with crude codes.
Along with these installations, Hassan Sharif develops a more ascetic and graphic work that is just as repetitive: the "semi-systems". From mathematical calculations, he sets rules for himself to create geometric designs, in endless columns of lines and segmented lines. He lets fatigue and boredom win him over to introduce errors, left visible. Like his work, the semi-systems expose a confrontation with authority and the means to escape it.
Hassan Sharif's work finds an echo in many Western artistic positions from the 1970s to the 1990s. As an extension of the exhibition, two rooms are devoted to the MAMC + collections, focusing in particular on minimal art, Fluxus, performance or Supports / Surfaces.
This traveling exhibition was designed by the Sharjah Art Foundation , Sharjah, UAE, and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi. The European tour of the exhibition was organized by the Sharjah Art Foundation in collaboration with the KW Berlin , the Malmö Konsthall and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Saint-Étienne Métropole.