ARTSPACE GALLERY @ ART DUBAI 2010

Dubai’s leading contemporary art gallery, ArtSpace, showcased an exhibition of world-renowned contemporary artist Adel El Siwi at ART Dubai 2010

Dubai’s dynamic ArtSpace gallery was proud to present the works of the diverse and innovative contemporary Egyptian artist, Adel El Siwi, at stand A-14 during ART Dubai, the only contemporary art fair in Dubai.

Adel El-Siwi was born in Beheira, Egypt in 1952. El-Siwi focuses his work on interior scape, aiming to give the traditional still life objects pride and powerful presence. El Siwi chooses to use simple themes including: flower pots, palm trees and camels. He strongly believes that the more limited the means the stronger the potential of the expression and refuses to use any other medium of painting other than paper or canvas.

From1970 to 1976, he studied medicine at Cairo University before seriously considering a career as a painter. Like other Egyptian artists of the late 1970s, El Siwi, who had emigrated to Europe and North America, was compelled to return to the motherland, drawn by the power of Egypt's legacy of art aesthetic achievement. In 1980 he moved to Milan only to return to Cairo in 1990 where he currently lives and works.
After twelve years of self-training and traveling Europe and Egypt he had his first major show in 1985 at the Cairo Atelier. Since the 1980s he has had solo exhibitions in Egypt, Germany, Lebanon and Italy. He has participated in group exhibitions as far across the globe as Brazil and Mexico. A 1988's exhibition at the Mashrabia Gallery in Cairo marked El Siwi's transition from the human figure to the interiors cape. This new phase attempted to give the traditional still life object pride and powerful presence. His latest works have been more narrative and ironic. Pure colors pierce the tonal elements, but are restrained by the somber Egyptian landscape marked by the monochromes of the desert and the grayness of Cairo. El-Siwi chooses to use the trite, simple themes of flower pots, palm trees, camels, etc. For considerable time, El Siwi strongly believed that the more limited the means the stronger the potential of the expression. Hence, he refused to use any other medium of painting than painting on paper or canvas. However, in his most recent work in the 1997's Venice Biennale's exhibition Modernity’s & Memories: Recent Works from the Islamic World, a room installation entitled The Face and Beyond, El Siwi explores the new genre of conceptual art through painting.

El Siwi’s recent works that is meant to inspire individuals to reconnect with their communities and examine relationship between the present moment and the past.
The whole work is about the magic relation between our daily life, our present moment, and something behind: something very old and deeply related to the far and remote past. “I tried to touch this relation through the human face for a very long time, yes the face: being old and recent in the same moment, now, perhaps I am haunting the same phantasm through the entire human figure.”



Artspace Gallery is now located in The Gate Village, Building 3, Level 2, Dubai International Financial Centre and is open from Saturday to Thursday, 10:00am to 8:00pm. For further information, contact the gallery at + 971 4 323 0821 or email info@artspace-dubai.com.

Launched in May 2003 at the Fairmont Dubai, Artspace Gallery invited Dubai and the region to acquaint themselves to Contemporary Middle Eastern Art. Having dedicated the past five years to promoting and establishing Contemporary Middle Eastern artists in the region, Artspace Gallery now boast a portfolio of over 20 artists, and are now located at the art district at The Gate Village, DIFC.
For more information and location:
Visit http://www.artspace-dubai.com/
or Call +9714 3230820

The gallery's diverse clientele includes private collectors, art consultants, corporate art consultants, architects, interior designers as well as business-people, government, diplomatic and
social VIPs. Art Space gallery offers the client an extraordinary opportunity to acquire and taste some of the most contemporary art.

Art Dubai takes place every March at the Madinat Arena. As the first contemporary art fair in Dubai, the Fair has become a cornerstone for the rapidly growing art community of the Middle East.
The 2009 fair will host nearly seventy galleries from the Middle East, Asia, Europe, North and South America, North Africa and Australia.


For further information please contact:
ARTSPACE
The Gate Village, Building 3, Level 2, Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC)
Tel: +971 4 323 0820
Fax: +971 4 323 0821
Email: info@artspace-dubai.com
www.artspace-dubai.com

Zakaria Ramhani Exhibition

For those of you that still have not gotten a chance to see Zakaria Ramhani's solo exhibition at ARTSPACE, be sure to do so! The works will be up till the 25th of April!

We’re proud to invite Zakaria Ramhani to ArtSpace for a second solo show here in Dubai. As a young artist he shows amazing talent through his unique creations using Arabic calligraphy to create faces. His work represents a growing number of young artists from the Middle East that we are keen to support by inviting them to exhibit at our gallery.

Ramhani cleverly turns simple but colorful modern writing and language in the creation of vibrant and mesmerizing faces that draw the viewer in.

Following a successful show at “Word into ART exhibition”, organized by the British Museum, Ramhani’s exhibition at Art Space will follow the same theme featuring pieces from a series of works titled “De droite à gauche”.

His innovative work involves investigations and uses a variety of writing and language from which a face emerges to create a portrait. The letter and face each become an illusion in turn. Overtime the series has evolved and many techniques, mediums and supports can be seen throughout his collection.

Commenting on his artistic endeavour, Ramhani says, “It is significant that it came after I was an Artist in Residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. When I returned home to Tangier (Morocco) after spending eight months living in France, I began writing on the canvas rather than painting on it. I no longer painted pictures; I wrote portraits with the materials instead.”

“The Arabic language is written from right to left, hence the title of the project. I use the plasticity, symbolism and aesthetic of writing to reveal and explain the notions of identity, culture and art that are generated by language. In concert with Arabic, the French language became a reality, my reality: the confrontation of cultures that is my life,” concluded Ramhani.

Born in Tangiers, Morocco in 1983, Ramhani graduated from the plastic arts section of the Centre Pedagogique Regional de Tanger in 2004 and from the Cervantes Centre for engraving in 2007.

Ramhani then went on to teach art at the “Oued amlil” in Taza from 2004 to 2006, and at the children’s painting studio at the Foundation Tanger el Medina in 2004. The artist has been involved with conferences on contemporary Moroccan art and was resident artist at the Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris in 2006.

Ramhani has participated in a number of group exhibitions, most recently Juillet 2006 at the Galerie Europia, Paris, which was concerned with the war in Lebanon in the summer 2006 and a solo exhibition, Corps possedes/Solitude collective, at the Galerie CROUS des Beaux-Arts, Paris.