Nabil Anani (Art Fair)

Abu Dhabi Art 2019

/ Khaled Hourani (Art Fair), Nabil Anani (Art Fair), Sliman Mansour (Art Fair), Tayseer Barakat (Art Fair), Wafa Hourani (Art Fair) / Abu Dhabi Art, Art Fair, Khaled Hourani, Nabil Anani, Sliman Mansour, Wafa Hourani /

ABU DHABI ART 2019

21 – 23 November, 2019
Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi
Booth S15

Zawyeh Gallery participates in Abu Dhabi Art 2019, with distinctive old and new artworks representing five renowned Palestinian artists: Khaled Hourani, Nabil Anani, Sliman Mansour, and Tayseer Barakat. Across the spectrum, the artists use a wealth of materials and represent a variety of styles, examining an array of subjects that stem from Palestinian reality.

Khaled Hourani participates with two pieces from his early project “Picasso in Palestine,” which was organized in cooperation with the Van Abbe Museum. While his “Picasso in Palestine, 2019” (acrylic on canvas), is a recreation of a photo of Picasso’s Buste de Femme (1943), exhibited in Ramallah in 2011, which appears with two Palestinian guards. His “Picasso in Palestine 2019, installation view: catastrophe and the power of art, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo” (Photography), is a reproduction of several layers of “photos of photos\” of guards wearing several national customs guarding eventually a previous photo of the original Picasso painting displayed on the exhibition wall in Ramallah. In his project Picasso in Palestine, Khaled Hourani originally questioned a complicated loan procedure and endless negotiations between different parties in order to display a famous painting in the exceptional nature of Palestinian reality. The project took new dimensions as it developed at a later stage when the new reproductions delved further into examining the relationship between art and power.

On the other hand, Nabil Anani, introduces new materials in his series “Olive Groves”, using natural desiccated plants, straw, and mixed media. His artworks capture an empty semi-arid landscape in which plants grow scarcely while olive trees thrive. The scenery of olive groves spreading over the horizon through the Palestinian landscape reflects the sturdy nature of this plant that remains rooted in the earth despite adversities.

Natural materials are also focal in Sliman Mansour’s artworks. The combination of mud and acrylic on wood reflects the tension between the rough cracks of mud which is dominant, in contrast to adjacent areas of smoothly painted acrylic colors. Mansour’s paintings represent the stalemate situation in the Palestinian current reality and the subsequent changes that permeate the nature of Palestinians as people. They suggest a slow transformation of colorful, vibrant figures into disintegrating characters broken into many colorless pieces. Yet, it is not all dim and gloomy, his “Temporary Escape” gives some hope that this transformation is only transient.

Tayseer Barakat‘s wooden work reminds us of early cave drawings. Animals, abstract figures, and alphabet-like symbols are all executed using wood-burning tools. His works represent a past phase from the nineties, in which the artist primarily examined details of his personal life in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza as if writing a prolonged detailed memoir.

: Nabil Anani, Olive Groves #2, 2019, mixed media on canvas, 100 × 112 cm

: Nabil Anani, Olive Groves #1 (2019), mixed media on canvas, 112 x 100 cm

: Khaled Hourani, Picasso in Palestine, 2019, photography (edition 1/1), 80 x 120 cm

: Khaled Hourani, Picasso in Palestine, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 122 x 152 cm

: Tayseer Barakat, Untitled, 1982, wood burning (pyrography) 82 x 80 cm

: Tayseer Barakat, Untitled, 1996, wood burning (pyrography) 89 x 70 cm

: Sliman Mansour, Temporary Escape, 2019, mud and acrylic on wood, 110 x 110 cm

: Sliman Mansour, Holy Land, 2019, mud and acrylic on wood, 110 x 100 cm

Paris Contemporary Art Show P/CAS

/ Nabil Anani (Art Fair), Tayseer Barakat (Art Fair), Vera Tamari (Art Fair) / Art Fair, Nabil Anani, Paris Contemporary Art Show, Tayseer Barakat, Vera Tamari /

PARIS CONTEMORARY ART SHOW P/CAS

17 – 20 October, 2019
118 Rue de Rivoli, Paris
Booth#33

Zawyeh Gallery introduces three of the most prominent artists in Palestine in its participation this year in Paris Contemporary Art Show: Nabil Anani, Tayseer Barakat and Vera Tamari. The artworks of the three Palestinian artists echo issues connecting to nature in their contexts; issues that have been a central stage in the day to day life in Palestine and the region.

The land, is a source of inspiration for Nabil Anani, who normally focuses on exploring the Palestinian landscape and life in Palestinian villages. This time, his project “Troubled Land” explores a beautiful utopian nature in the Palestinian landscape in contrary to the reality that is full of military interruptions of the scenery. From behind fences, checkpoints, bypass roads, settlements, the separation wall and the closed military zones, its has become extremely difficult for Palestinians to access their landscape for cultivation let alone for the enjoyment of natural scenery. Yet, Anani chooses to ignore all such issues, and focus on different cheer elements of beauty such as the colorful trees that appear like ornaments in an embroidered traditional dress of nature. Yet, the shadows of vanishing faces and houses that appear sometime in the background remain a reminder of a lost connection between the Palestinians and their scenic landscape that has been disappearing gradually as a result of occupation.

On the other hand, Tayseer Barakat’s body of work “Shoreless Sea” ward off from discussing the locale and manifests as an account on the refugee’s mayhem journeys through the Mediterranean Sea, a subject of a strong relevance to the artist’s life. Barakat is a refugee himself who lived a good part of his life as a child by the Mediterranean shores of Gaza and as a university student by the Mediterranean shores of Alexandria. Nonetheless, this same sea that he grew up next to, transformed in recent years to become a beast that swallows fellow refugees in their desperate trips in search for new decent lives in Europe. As if it withdrew its shores and hid them away, leaving flights of refugees to their gloomy fate. His artworks depict a constantly wavy monsters, which seems as if breathing heavily from beneath the boats through the lungs of hundreds of refugees who lost their lives under the water in their journeys to “shoreless” Europe.

Vera Tamari investigates the landscape through her works, not via clay – her favorite medium – but through gouache. Her artworks take a new turn as she draws the Palestinian hills in abstraction, using primitive lines and shapes presenting a dreamy atmosphere of hills, houses and trees.

: Tayseer Barakat, Shoreless Sea, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 50 x 70 cm

: Tayseer Barakat, Shoreless Sea, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 47 x 41 cm

: Tayseer Barakat, Shoreless Sea, 2018, Acrylic on Canvas, 50 x 70 cm

: Tayseer Barakat, Shoreless Sea, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 41 x 47 cm

: Vera Tamari, Village at Dusk, 2019, crayons on paper, 35 x 25 cm

: Vera Tamari, Starry Night on Jericho Hills, 2017, crayons on paper, 25 x 35 cm

: Vera Tamari, Bejeweled Spring, 2019, crayons on paper, 25 x 35 cm

: Vera Tamari, Mountain Summer Tower, 2017, crayons on paper, 35 x 25 cm

: Nabil Anani, Troubled Land #4, 2019, mixed media on paper, 50 x 32 cm

: Nabil Anani, Troubled Land #5, 2019, mixed media on paper, 50 x 32 cm

: Nabil Anani, Troubled Land #6, 2019, mixed media on paper, 50 x 32 cm

: Nabil Anani, Troubled Land #7, 2019, mixed media on paper, 50 x 32 cm

Galleries at MAS Abu Dhabi 2019

/ Hosni Radwan (Art Fair), Nabil Anani (Art Fair), Rafat Asad (Art Fair), Rana Samara (Art Fair), Tayseer Barakat (Art Fair), Vera Tamari (Art Fair) / Abu Dhabi 2019, Art Fair, Galleries at MAS, Hosni Radwan, Nabil Anani, Rana Samara, Tayseer Barakat, Vera Tamari /

GALLERIES AT MAS ABU DHABI 2019

April 8 – June 8, 2019
Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi
Booth A2

Zawyeh Gallery is participating at the 2019 Galleries at MAS, Abu Dhabi, featuring works by Nabil Anani, Rafat Asad, Tayseer Barakat, Hosni Radwan, Rana Samara, and Vera Tamari. Zawyeh Gallery’s art fair selection captures diverse works by emerging and established artists from Palestine and the diaspora, as the only Palestinian Gallery represented at the art fair. These works are the personal aesthetic elucidations of individual artists whose lives are intertwined by their collective memory and experiences as Palestinian artists enduring similar fates relating to disenfranchisement and loss.

The following are biographical information on the participating artists:

Nabil Anani (b.1943, Latroun, Palestine) is one of the most prominent Palestinian artists working today. He is considered by many as a key founder of the contemporary Palestinian art movement.
Tayseer Barakat was born in Gaza in 1959 and completed his arts education in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1983. After completing his studies, he moved to Ramallah where he has since based – both teaching and creating art.
Hosni Radwan was born in Baghdad in 1955. He studied fine arts at the University of Baghdad specializing in graphics. He held a number of solo exhibitions in Iraq, Lebanon, Cyprus, Japan and Palestine.
Vera Tamari was born in Jerusalem in 1945. She received a B.A. in fine arts in 1966 from the Beirut College for Women (now the Lebanese American University) in Lebanon.
Shada Safadi is a visual artist born in Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights. She finished a two-year-class in painting and etching at Adham Ismail Institute in Damascus in 2003, before she joined the department of painting at Damascus University, in which she graduated from with a degree in fine arts in 2005

: Tayseer Barakat, The Dance, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 41 x 47 cm

: Hosni Radwan, Out of Place #15, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 67 x 67 cm

: Vera Tamari, Like in a Dream, 2014, watercolour on paper, 30 x 40 cm

: Rafat Asad, Marj Ibn Amer #12, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 80 x 90 cm

: Nabil Anani, Kobar, 2013, mixed media on paper, 65 x 50 cm

: Shada Safadi, Limitless, 2018, etching, monotype, 35 x 35 cm

Visualizing Palestine: An Intimate Portrait of a Land | Abu Dhabi Art 2018

/ Nabil Anani (Art Fair), Sliman Mansour (Art Fair) / Abu Dhabi Art 2018, An Intimate Portrait of a Land, Art Fair, Nabil Anani, Sliman Mansour, Visualizing Palestine /

VISUALIZING PALESTINE: AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT OF A LAND | ABU DHABI ART 2018

14 – 17 November, 2018
Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi

Zawyeh Gallery presents ‘ Visualizing Palestine: An Intimate Portrait of a Land ‘, an exhibition of selected works by two of Palestine’s most significant and senior artists, Nabil Anani and Sliman Mansour. Both primarily painters have played a crucial role in defining modern art in Palestine. Their works are a repository of images of the Palestinian experience, but particularly of the landscape as reimagined and revisualised through both artists’ intimate knowledge of its stories, history and the contemporary devastations visited upon it. Their timeless images evoke the specific geography of this place while telling us about the occupation that has redesigned its borders and contours. In vibrant colours and with bold, emphatic drawing, both artists render a vivid experience in paint of the specific Palestinian geography with its iconic and ancient olive trees, the traditional stone houses of the villages built into the terraced hillsides, and some of the more modern manifestations of ‘home’: the refugee camps now similarly embedded in the Palestinian topography.

Their works also portray the people whose lives are intimately connected to the land, to its subtle modulations of light and shadow, the daily sunrises and sunsets and the seasonal rhythms. The men, women and children who have lived and worked on this land have strived to preserve its cultural heritage and protect it from theft and appropriation. Symbolic, yet crucial, images—the olive groves and their harvest, the nurturing maternal figure in traditional dress, the refugee with only the simple garment she stands up in, images in photographs of those who have gone before who gave their lives for freedom fill these paintings by two artists who have made such an important contribution to Palestine’s visualisation of itself. Nabil Anani and Sliman Mansour are both seminal figures in the history of art in Palestine. Members of the New Visions group of artists formed in the First Intifada, they used non-traditional art materials such as earth and leather in multimedia and assemblage works as a means of boycotting traditional paint and canvas that came from Israeli suppliers and protesting against the violence of the occupation. They are the two most influential artists in the history of modern Palestinian visual arts, whose lives and work have been concurrent with the timescale of events in Palestine and who have articulated and envisioned that legacy in the powerful works of art this exhibition presents for the first time to the audience at Abu Dhabi Art.