Semi-Systems
Mohammed Kazem: Ways of Marking Aicon Gallery, New York 18 January – 24 February 2018
Artistic innovation might have come late to the United Arab Emirates, but when it came it revolutionised how artists conceived of new practices. This notion took shape in the UAE when Hassan Sharif, now known as the father of conceptual art in the Middle East, began making art from ready-mades, found materials, and detritus. Sharif’s inspiration began in the 1980s while studying at the Byam School of Art in London. He became particularly interested in the 1960s Fluxus and Dada movements, which emphasised blurring the distinction between art and life. On his return to the UAE, Sharif, with a core group of cohorts who came to be known as ‘the five’, spearheaded the birth of artistic experimentation in his country.
Two solo exhibitions in New York feature how Sharif and Mohammed Kazem, a member of ‘the five’, devised their own methodologies that transformed art from making objects of aesthetic contemplation to conceiving articles of conceptual orientation. At Alexander Gray Associates, Sharif’s exhibition Semi-Systems focuses on his use of the grid, geometry, and repetitive gestures in works from 1982 until his death in 2016. Here, Sharif’s random combinations of materials yield unexpected results. In Iron (2014), coils of wire are wrapped around the existing grid of a found metal frame, such that from afar it resembles a series of crisscrossing lines. For Sharif this process of ‘weaving’ became a kind of mark making in his work. Without using traditional tools associated with art, Sharif created abstract configurations that represented a completely new art making practice.
This unconventional idea of mark making appears in a far