Blue: Hassan Sharif

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde is proud to present Blue, Hassan Sharif’s third solo show at the gallery, focusing on the late artist’s highly individualistic approach to colour. Spanning multiple bodies of work—paintings, Objects, Boxes, Experiments and even Semi-System-like pieces—Blue reveals how Sharif’s almost irreverent engagement with colour exemplifies his entire philosophy of art making. A tireless experimenter who pushed the limits of his own exploration, Sharif deployed a double-barrelled strategy with colour—both subverting and elevating it. Shifting, morphing, sabotaged or framed for the viewer to ponder, colour is a “red thread” weaving across four decades of work. By considering Sharif’s practice through the specific prism of colour, Blue prompts us to re-examine the complexity of Sharif’s vision, providing a closer look at some of the impulses and contradictions that shaped it.

“Recklessly repetitive,” as he described himself in an unusually introspective series of essays from 2005, Sharif maintains a compelling balance in his practice between rigour and randomness. On one hand, the slow, futile gestures of tying, weaving, knotting, and the crisp meticulousness of the semi-systems. On the other, a taste for the accident, for letting a process unravel, for following a work down an unexpected path. His sense of irony—the wry humour, the bite of sarcasm, the playful disingenuousness—pulses through it all.