Top 10 Middle Eastern Artists to Watch
SOURCE: BLOUIN ARTINFO
Outside its borders, the Middle East is often associated with oil and conflict yet it happens also to be a region with no shortage of artistic talent. Some of the more seasoned artists born in the area are now getting major museum shows in the West. Here are the top 10 to watch.
The son of a grocer who had nine other children, Azzawi was born and raised in Baghdad, studied archaeology, then went on to devote his life to painting, drawing and printmaking. His skill at those disciplines is astounding. A London resident since 1976, he has watched events in the Middle East from afar, and expressed his deep feelings about them in his work. Azzawi’s masterpiece, now owned by Tate, is “Sabra and Shatila Massacre,” a mural-sized drawing that is reminiscent of Picasso’s “Guernica” but is actually a giant ink-and-crayon drawing mounted on panels. Azzawi received a major tribute across two museums in Qatar in 2016-17: the largest solo show any Arab artist ever had, according to the organizers, with more than 500 works on display.
Recognition came late to Farmanfarmaian, as it has to so many other women artists of her generation. The Iranian-born artist, who makes sculptures using the ancient Iranian technique of mirror-work, got her first-ever Western museum retrospective in March 2015 — at the Guggenheim in New York, and at the age of 91. Her passion for mirrorwork began in the early 1970s, when she visited a famous mosque in Shiraz that is bedecked with carved mirror fragments. Earlier, she had spent 12 years in New York, hobnobbing with such figures as Andy Warhol. She moved back to New York after the Iranian Revolution, but now lives and works in Tehran.
Born in Shiraz, Iran, in 1963, Moshiri in March 2008 became the first living Middle Eastern artist with a Contemporary work auctioned for more than $1 million. His “Eshgh” (“Love,” 2007) was a black canvas with the Persian word for love embroidered on it. Since then, the artist, whose works are a mix of Western and Eastern Pop art and kitsch, has gone from strength to strength. Last year, he got his first solo museum exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is represented by Perrotin Gallery in Paris and by Thaddeus Ropac in Salzburg (Austria), which gave him a show in 2018.
Wael Shawky
Egyptian-born Shawky explores episodes in the history of the Middle East via his highly individual films and performances. Conveying a serious message in an entertaining and unexpected way, he reflects on the clashes between East and West. His best-known work is a trilogy in which he represents centuries of conflict between Christians and Muslims, including the Crusades, using puppetry and marionettes. Shawky has had shows in a slew of important institutions including the Serpentine Galleries in London (2013-14) and MoMA PS1 in New York (2015).
Tanavoli is today the world’s most expensive living Iranian artist, overtaking his younger compatriot Farhad Moshiri (see above). Predominantly a sculptor, he is best-known for his “Heech” series, which is basically a stylized, three-dimensional representation of the Persian word for “nothing.” By his own admission, he has produced a few hundred “Heech” sculptures; one of them is currently on display in the British Museum. In 2015, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College gave him his first U.S. museum show. Tanavoli’s work is a cross between East and West: he uses the tools and materials of Western art to depict the themes, symbols and traditions of ancient Iran.
Akram Zaatari
Born and based in Lebanon, Zaatari is a rising star of the Middle Eastern art world. A photographer and filmmaker, he is represented by the prestigious Thomas Dane Gallery (whose client list includes Steve McQueen). His art, like those of his compatriots, invariably carries traces of the Lebanese Civil War, which he experienced as a child growing up in the southern town of Saida. Already as a teenager, he started collecting images and sounds from his environment; they now form the core of his art practice, though his works can sometimes be fictional rather than depict a documentary reality. Zaatari’s work has been exhibited in Kassel for the Documenta show (2012), among other places.
After five decades producing canvases away from the international spotlight, the Lebanese-American artist, now in her nineties, is a darling of the museum world. Her breakthrough happened at the influential Documenta art exhibition in Kassel in 2012, and since then, she has had shows at the Serpentine Galleries in London and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, and is represented by the White Cube Gallery in London. Also an award-winning poet and novelist, Adnan produces small, delicate canvases in an uplifting palette that recall the works of her art-historical hero, Paul Klee.
The Olympic Torch for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta was designed by him, and he was also responsible for the 375-foot Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis. Yet Minnesota-based Armajani was born in Tehran in 1939. He has been based in Minneapolis since 1960, creating works that are halfway between sculpture and architecture. His recent retrospective at the Walker Art Center there — “Siah Armajani: Follow This Line” — covered the full range of works produced in the course of his 60-year career, including “Fallujah” (2004-5), an anti-war sculpture that he produced after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The show opens at the Met Breuer in New York in February.
Half Qatari, half American, and having grown up in both places, the artist, filmmaker and writer Sophia Al-Maria expresses the modern-day schizophrenia of the Gulf states in her work. She has come up with a term for it: “Gulf futurism.” It refers to a landscape that is characterized by wealth and materialism, sportscars and high-tech gadgets, disregard for the environment, and reactionary Islam. Al-Maria’s message has resonated so intensely in the art world that she got her first solo exhibition in the U.S. at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 2016. It included a new video called “Black Friday,” which reflected on the proliferation of U.S.-style shopping malls all over the Gulf states. In another museum-world accolade, Al-Maria was writer in residence at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2018.
Born in 1970 in Bethlehem, Jacir grew up in Saudi Arabia and Italy before getting a degree from the Memphis College of Art. She now spends a lot of time in Ramallah and has played a prominent role in enhancing the cultural life of the Palestinian territories. Jacir won the Golden Lion award for an artist under 40 at the Venice Biennale in 2007 for her “Material for a film,” an open-ended project started in 2004 that looks back on the life of the Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter, who was assassinated by Israeli agents outside his apartment in Rome in 1972. It includes letters, interviews, family photographs and other documentation around the killing. It was a centerpiece of Jacir’s show at the Whitechapel Gallery in
2015-16.
This story appears in the January edition of Modern Painters magazine.
