Hassan Sharif (1951-2016), a key pioneer in establishing contemporary art practice, introduced the apotheosis of found objects as sculpture in the United Arab Emirates, enabling his visionary work to explore new routes in the discourse of contemporary art, social commentaries and philosophical ideals.
Sharif’s Images in Iron feature as emblematic expressions of the artist’s interest with language and communicative systems combined with his fascination of the dictionary and absurdist experimentation. Utilizing a standardized Arabic-English dictionary, he analyses and dissects the texts creating hundreds of drawings that illustrate some obscure definitions. He then traced these illustrations and fabricated them in a much-exaggerated scale as iron plates. Layering these plates against a surface with wire, he creates a series of 3-dimensional protrusions, to the effect that the original shapes are lost as new forms emerge in the intersection of lines and shapes – an invitation for the viewer to find their own images in this collision.