Hosni Radwan

/ Hosni Radwan (Artist) / Artist, Hosni Radwan /

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. Radwan took part in international biennales, including those of Berlin, Cairo, and Sharjah. He left Baghdad in 1979 and headed to Beirut, where he worked in graphic design and journalism while continuing to draw and paint, using his talents to express his position vis-à-vis the cause of his people. Radwan’s works have special characteristics as they do not include realistic or political imitations. Hosni Radwan seeks to photograph the external world in all of its spaces and its various states and situations, using techniques that go beyond colour and different materials, thus forming a world of his own. Details of the scenes in Baghdad have played a major role in his artistic experience, inspiring his work that has spanned over 25 years of ongoing production. He mixes acrylics with sand, wood and paper, and other visible and tangible objects, creating mounds surrounding his works and their special, abstract world.

Hosni Radwan has exhibited widely, and his solo shows have been held in cities including Tunis (1993); Tokyo (1985); Nicosia (1983); Ramallah (2003,2002,1997); Baghdad (2001), and Kuwait (2008). Radwan lives and works in Holland.

: Hosni Radwan, City of Paradoxes #10 (2023), charcoal & acrylic on canvas, 143 × 100 cm

: Hosni Radwan, City of Paradoxes #11 (2023), charcoal & acrylic on canvas, 95 × 77 cm

: Hosni Radwan, City of Paradoxes #4 (2022), charcoal & acrylic on canvas, 120 × 78 cm

: Hosni Radwan, City of Paradoxes #3 (2022), charcoal & acrylic on canvas, 113 × 76 cm

: Hosni Radwan, Jerusalem Sky (2021), acrylic on canvas, 79 × 117 cm

: Hosni Radwan, City of Paradoxes #8 (2022), charcoal, gold leaf & acrylic on canvas, 95 × 75.5 cm

: Hosni Radwan, City of Paradoxes #11 (2023), charcoal, gold leaf & acrylic on canvas, 95 × 75.5 cm

: Hosni Radwan, Dome of the Rock #2 (2020), acrylic on canvas, 96 × 66 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 /

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

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

Jerusalem: 51 Years of Occupation

/ Fouad Agbaria (Exhibition), Hosni Radwan (Exhibition), Nabil Anani (Exhibition), Osama Said (Exhibition), Sliman Mansour (Exhibition) / Exhibition, Fouad Agbaria, Hosni Radwan, Jerusalem: 51 Years of Occupation, Nabil Anani, Sliman Mansour /

Jerusalem: 51 Years of Occupation Jerusalem Exhibition : 51 Years of Occupation

Hosni Radwan, Jerusalem at Night (2021), charcoal and gold leaf on canvas, 129 × 102 cm

JERUSALEM: 51 YEARS OF OCCUPATION
COLLECTIVE EXHIBITION

21 APRIL - 14 JUNE 2018

The overwhelming significance of the physicality of Jerusalem as a national symbol permeates many of the artworks. The iconic representation of the Dome of the Rock comes to the fore as some artists celebrate the city via exceptionally colorful works, especially those by Fouad Agbaria, Ibrahim Nobani, Osama Said, Dina Mattar, the late Issam Bader, and to an extent Ahed Izhiman. Conversely, a strong sense of melancholy and grief overshadows the charcoal works of Nabil Anani, Hosni Radwan, and the photorealism painting of Adam Shehada, where the cities lose its color. Similarly, Sliman Mansour calls in his artwork upon the ghosts of the past to haunt the city’s present time. Khaled Hourani presents a man struggling to hang up a sign of Jerusalem written in Arabic. The Wall in Tayseer Barakat and Mohammad Joulani’s artworks is a prominent feature, while Fayez Sirsawi presents a diary of students’ daily life under occupation.

The exhibition also showcases contemporary artists’ perspectives on the socio-political issues surrounding the city’s ongoing occupation. The racial discrimination practices towards Palestinians by the Israeli regime are the subject of Yazan Khalili’s artwork, while Benji Boyadgian’s work is a journey in time in the midst of the complex and fragmented Palestinian landscape of the 21st century “Mega Jerusalem.” Rana Samara’s work focuses on the sights of demolished homes highlighting Israel’s illegal policy of house demolitions and ethnic cleansing. Rehab Nazzal’s photography work focuses on demonstrations against the Israeli regime’s policies in the city through an ironic scene that reveals from a distance a masked demonstrator taking a rest amid a cloud of intensive smoke. Michael Hallaq, on the other hand, explores touristic objects that can be found abundantly at souvenir shops around the city, capturing a different layer of “the holy” city that remains popular with tourists even though it is detached from reality. Rawan Khaliliyeh’s artwork is an exploration of the aesthetics of old wooden slabs that are used in building sites, which are scarce in the eastern part of the city due to building restrictions. Varvara Razak attempts to combine traditional symbols presented in the transformation of a Knafeh triangular piece into a traditionally embroidered cushion sold in souvenir shops.

: Sliman Mansour, A Family Without A Shadow (2018), charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 115 x 140 cm

: Osama Said, Jerusalem (2018), oil on canvas, 40 x 50 cm

: Nabil Anani, Faces of Jerusalem (2018), charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

: Hosni Radwan, Jerusalem at Night (2021), charcoal and gold leaf on canvas, 129 × 102 cm

Out of Place by Hosni Radwan

/ Hosni Radwan (Exhibition) / Exhibition, Hosni Radwan, Out of Place /

Hosni Radwan, Out of Place #8 (2017), acrylic on canvas, 140 x 140 cm

OUT OF PLACE
HOSNI RADWAN

9 DECEMBER 2017 - 11 JANUARY 2018

In his latest exhibition,”Out of Place,”Palestinian artist Hosni Radwan makes a provocative association between tragedy and the plane. Tragic events occupy the visual field, rendering dimension impossible and halting representation at a single level. In the absence of familiar depth, the eye must seek out a different way to look.

Delicate drawings of faces, figures, boats, planes, clouds, and rocks repeat across Radwan’s canvases here without conclusion, rendered fragile and often interrupted and overlaid by startling blocks of color. These blocks bisect and structure the canvases, directing the eye precisely along their lines in often-unfamiliar directions. Many of the paintings, for instance, read vertically rather than horizontally, a disturbance of narrative progression that recalls the profound disruption of Palestine’s historical narrative in the twentieth century. The figures in these paintings, too, refuse easy viewing: their faces are often turned down or away, and elsewhere eyes are shadowed, closed, or obscured by washes of paint. The paintings recall and refuse the simulation of communication – the meeting of eyes, painted and real – at the center of the traditional portrait. The boats, rocks, and skies that re-occur across the paintings are each abstracted and dislocated, never permitted to form the landscapes from which they are drawn.

As such, these paintings, which might seem gentle or even playful, constitute a profound engagement on multiple levels with the contemporary tragedy of Palestine. Images in which figures are interrupted or bisected by panels of color take on new meaning in the light of the horrors wrought on human bodies by occupation and war in, for instance, Gaza. That the painted faces refuse to meet the viewer’s eye seems a response to the stream of media images of Palestinian suffering, which have stripped from those photographed even the privacy of grief. The motifs and colors that reappear across the paintings, in new permutations and yet always recognizable, recall the sheer endlessness of Palestinian tragedy, which has already stretched across decades and shows no sign of a finale.

Repetition here does not produce coherence or form, only resemblance. For all their play with the surface, the paintings are at their most profound in the questions they pose about the need for new modes of representation in the face of tragic repetition and the limits of art in the face of human suffering.

: Hosni Radwan, Out of Place #19 (2017), acrylic on canvas, 80 x 70 cm

: Hosni Radwan, Out of Place #8 (2017), acrylic on canvas, 140 x 140 cm

: Hosni Radwan, Out of Place #13, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 140 x 140 cm

: Hosni Radwan, Out of Place #26 (2017),acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

: Hosni Radwan, Out of Place #9 (2017), acrylic on canvas, 140 x 140 cm

: Hosni Radwan, Out of Place #25 (2017),, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

: Hosni Radwan, Out of Place #24 (2017), acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

: Hosni Radwan, Out of Place #5 (2017), acrylic on canvas, 140 x 140 cm

: Hosni Radwan, Out of Place #4 (2017), acrylic on canvas, 130 x 130 cm

: Hosni Radwan, Out of Place #15 (2017), mixed media on canvas, 67 x 67 cm

: Hosni Radwan, Out of Place #3 (2017), acrylic on canvas, 140 x 140 cm

: Hosni Radwan, Out of Place #1 (2017), acrylic on canvas, 140 x 140 cm

Out of Place by Hosni Radwan

Fragments by Hosni Radwan

/ Hosni Radwan (Exhibition) / Exhibition, Fragments, Hosni Radwan /

FRAGMENTS
HOSNI RADWAN

21 MARCH - 2 APRIL 2015

Hosni Radwan’s paintings have absorbed the colors, and spirit of Palestine, mingling in the turmoil of feelings, faces, thoughts, and bodies that inhabit it. The artist is what Baudelaire describes as a “lover of crowds and incognitos” who appreciates “everything that happens on the surface of the world.” We meet Radwan’s art in the streets of Palestine, where a woman sits pensively on the doorsteps holding her knees in search of some rest (Patiently Waiting, acrylic and charcoal, 2015). Is she waiting for someone, thinking or dreaming? Another woman walks by; a girl whispers in her friend’s ear (Discrete, 2015 charcoal on paper); a gust of wind blows and dark hair trails in the breeze (Breeze,2015 mixed media on paper); a man walks by on his way to work; a woman sits in a café; will he talk to her? Men and women carry on their usual business in the streets of the city, in the market, and in shops. They all live in the universe of Radwan’s work. Bodies and faces appear and disappear in the artist’s densely worked paintings.

Each body is a continent; each face is a map of effects, memories, and expressions. For, a mouth or an eye is not simply body parts – they have their own stories to tell. Stories without words speak to us in the language of material – of vivid colors, shapes, and textures. The artist depicts bodies and faces as fragmented; in his paintings, any illusion of the unity of perception is disrupted. These bodies and faces are like the places they inhabit, a modern patchwork of memories, concrete buildings, images, lived lives, smells, and sensations. Any ideal unity is exploded. To create the effect of fragmentation, the artist’s work makes a reference to Picasso’s deconstructive style, sometimes using support wood or paper to disrupt not only the unity of the depicted subject but also of the support itself. Mask (2014), for instance, is a diptych showing two mouths roughly painted in white on a piece of wood mounted on supports made of wood and paper. In Radwan’s paintings, the face becomes the surface on which the subject’s interiority and the outside world are equally reflected. A nose becomes a tree, a chick changes into a square, and a mouth transforms into a bench. As the painting takes shape, figures emerge, and the reality of the place unfolds. In Radwan’s work, art manifests with an insatiable passion for seeing and feeling.

It sets up a house in the heart of the place, in the middle of the ebb and flow of the crowd, in the infinite and the fleeting. Art responds to the movements of a place and reproduces the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all its elements: colors, spirits, joy, and pain of Palestine. Radwan’s paintings and drawings do not so much depict the place, for the place lives in them.