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The 10th edition of Art Dubai kicked off with great fanfare. Unlike the vast expanse of the recent Armory Show in New York, three manageably sized exhibition spaces at the Madinat Jumeirah allowed visitors to peruse a strong display of works from the Middle East and the surrounding regions of South and Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Africa, with a few representations from Europe.
Increasingly viewed as a strong outpost of regional art, Art Dubai presented thoughtfully curated booths with an emphasis on abstract and landscape paintings, new and unseen sculpture, minimalist works on paper, and striking photography. Postcard sized spare paintings of the changing Pakistani urban landscape by Risham Syed at Project 88, contrasted well with Aida Mahmudova’s thick impasto brushstrokes of nature in her native Baku, Azerbaijan at Yay Gallery. For T. Shanaathanan, a mash up of memory and architecture resulted in strange earthy landscapes of a war-torn Jaffna after the twenty-six year civil war in Sri Lanka. Galerie Lelong’s presentation of the Cameroonian artist Barthelemy Toguo’s eye-catching purple-blue watercolor and pastel work Night Singers, 2014, stood out as did the Korean artist Yeesookyung’s quiet surreal paintings of cartoon and manga figures at Ota Fine Arts.
Modernist works, such as the late Pakistani artist Syed Sadequain’s suite of twenty-two lithographs at the Grosvenor Gallery, and posthumous colourful figurative paintings of native Ugandans by Geoffrey Mukasa, showcased the artists’ ingenious combination of Western and local influences, as did Ibrahim El-Salahi’s black and white abstractions of his people in Sudan at Vigo Gallery. The French artist Julien Segard at Experimenter captured architectural spaces with compelling acuity in his suite of seventeen charcoal geometric drawings, while the Mexican artist Gonzalo Lebrija’s