The exhibition displays the vertical cross section of artistic production in Bahrain and brings together recent contemporary pieces and historical work – in painting, drawing, and sculpture. The collection is a glimpse into how these individual artists see and interpret the world with their personal vocabulary of cross-pollinated styles.

The five artists in the exhibition come from one generation of Bahrainis who left the kingdom in the late sixties and early seventies to study in different art schools in Europe and the USA.  Upon their return to Bahrain, they commenced their careers and have inhabited different positions, enjoying varying degrees of renown.

The Artist

Rashid Al Khalifa. Fabric of Society, 2011. 150 x 150 cm,
lacquered convex with enamel paint work

RASHID AL KHALIFA (b.1952)
Brighton and Hastings Art College, UK

One of the significant artists included is Rashid Al Khalifa, perhaps the most influential and inspirational to others in finding their own path. Over the last 40 years he has developed his work by moving steadily back through the history of Western painting to reach the contemporary. He is one of the earliest Bahraini experimentalists who made his own research formulating a progressive aesthetics that took off in hybrid directions. With his groundbreaking “convex” service, he pushed a conceptual style to the forefront of his work and began to create on the “convex” – in canvas, chrome and lacquer – painterly modes in monochrome, color field driven abstraction and geometric work, bringing a certain renewed sense of dialogue with painting’s past, the near and distant future.

Abdulrahim Sharif. Face & Bathtub, 2012. 160 x 150 cm, oil on canvas

ABDULRAHIM SHARIF (b.1954)
Ecole Nationale Superiere des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France and Parson’s School of Design, NYC, USA

Realizing that visual future is undergoing rapid change, colorist Abdulrahim Sharif’s confidence in his painterly powers have unleashed his ability to introduce a compositional device that subtly disrupts the entire structure or rather unites it at a different level. Amid inventive figures and undulated shapes, the vectors sketched out by the gestures combine energy and risk-taking that presents a kind of freedom to the painting with a chaotic fecundity that contrives to keep the viewer continually off-balance. Equally celebratory, they are paeans to the human gift of order and chaos. On viewing this kind of work, one can say that ‘painting’ will be a part of our visual future or at least will go down in a blaze of glory.

Balqees Fakhro. Untitled, 2013.

BALQEES FAKHRO (b.1950)
Lone Mountain College in San Francisco, USA

Balqees Fakhro’s abstractions appear to draw from the deep recesses of the Arab culture. For the better part of a decade, her canvases had been meticulously textured single-color fields of impastoed paint which she disrupts by introducing a sliver of two or more colors where underlying hues peek through the interstices of the palette strokes. She employs a procedural strategy that begins with an ordered geometric plane and then counters its foundation by a more random order of painterly moves. At the heart of her painting, is an apparent expression of her feeling about her environment and the world – turned into interlocking abstract forms endowing her non-figurative work with genuine spiritual feeling.

Khalil Al Hashimi. Concert, 2011.50 x 50 x 27cm, bronze

KHALIL AL HASHIMI (b.1949)
Academy of Fine Arts, Leningrad, Russia

The sculptures of Khalil Al Hashim are defined by elegance and restraint that honors Russian academics infused with contemporary ideas and aesthetic impact. His work is inspired by reflective thoughts bearing traces of his territory and heritage in wood, marble and metal. His recent works are cast in bronze and are deceivingly modest.  These sculptures are anything but “metal” and the iridescence of the surface  create a unique voice within that shouts resilience, regal and celebratory.

AHMED BAQER (b. 1949-2008)
Ecole Nationale Superiere des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France

Ahmed Baqer from the collection of the
Bahrain National Museum

Ahmed Baqer has focused his attention throughout his artistic life on pencil drawings. In a display of consistent energy and self-assured execution, he conjured figures in motion, of horses and men, in tonal variations interwoven with lines composed of tiny motifs repeated hundreds of times in an allover pattern.  One can easily feel the changing of pressure and speed in his hand, something like a conductor coaxing a subtle decibel or tempo change from an orchestra. Brimming with sharply observed detail, the compositional sense and the emotional base of his drawing bear out a French penchant for atmosphere and gestural beauty. Erasing areas to enhance volume, he opens and closes an assortment of shapes with heavier touches, more aggressive, with a staccato attack where the density and gestural force of his line take command of the encompassing space – with grace and elegance.

Contemporary Bahraini Art Exhibition: New Horizons exhibition is curated by Shouq Al Alawi and co-curated by Abdulrahim Sharif organized in the framework of Manama Capital of Tourism 2013 and the Days of Culture of the Kingdom of Bahrain in Russia. A project of The Ministry of Culture of the Kingdom of Bahrain in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.