A PRIME ACTIVITY: Mohammed Kazem

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde is pleased to announce Mohammed Kazem’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, which focuses on his paintings – a relatively unknown aspect of his practice. Kazem has been painting since his late teens and early 20s, went on to win the first prize in painting at Muscat Youth Biennial in 1990 and loved the surface so much that he remained consciously aware to the inspiration coming from the medium itself.

He did not allow himself to be enslaved by a particular medium or a specific pigment, which is visible in his earlier series of intimate watercolours largely inspired by the atelier of the late fellow artist Hassan Sharif, in which Kazem would change the predominant colours on each work and create visible differences merely based on pigment experimentation. Hassan Sharif remarked that the young artist was remarkable for“dealing first and foremost with the paint and its colours, and not the scene and its objects.” Materiality for Kazem is both an outcome and an inspiration: it is at once folded into the genesis of a work - the feel of objects in Tongue (1994), the bumpy paper of Scratches (1990 - ), the squished wads of gum in Kisses (2017) —and the rough raised finish of outdoor wall coverings in his new series Neighbours (2018) - the texture marks that thread throughout many works.