New Works by Ahmad Moualla opens at Green Art Gallery.
At the early stage in his career, being deeply influenced by theatre, Ahmad’s works would depict people engaged in vague rituals, whether it was ceremonial, festive or religious, one cannot tell. Mankind was made up of lonely individuals or groups whispering to one another amid a commotion, conspiring, mocking, intelligent and half-animal. In these works, the theatrical play of life in this bitter and mocking fashion requires people to be in tumult as they take their journey of pilgrimage and/or in life.
In the next phase of his work, Ahmad started to slowly go back to his classical calligraphy training and education; words suddenly stared to appear in his works. At first they were just words, that fleeted accidently from the painting: utterances from the conversation being held by the masses, gradually becoming center stage in his work. A verse or a literary quotation would appear, intermittently dispersed across his canvas without the need for regularity or intelligibility. They are not there to illuminate the paintings or explain it to us. Ahmad is uninterested in what appears but rather in what is hidden.
With his new body of work, words and letters started replacing the masses; in these works Ahmad is more interested in the message rather than the messenger, where the latter is as mysterious as his theatrical staging. Letters and words, taken from verses and other literary works, intermingled and overlapped. Light, shades and grades of colour created a multifaceted impression of the work that was subject to one’s sensory reception as well as proximity. But the real strength of Ahmad’s new work, is that what initially seemed random was in fact meticulously and carefully designed.
October 17th - November 20th 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday October 17th, 7:30 pm onwards
About Ahmad Moualla
Born in Syria in 1958, Ahmad Moualla graduated from the Damascus University of Fine Arts and then continued at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. Since then he has participated in various exhibitions in Dubai, Cairo, Paris, Istanbul, Bahrain, Kuwait, Austria and Germany, among many others and his work was also included in the 2007 Sotheby's Modern and Contemporary Arab and Iranian Auction which took place in London. He is the recipient of various awards including the Lattakia Biennale and most recently, the Al Burda Prize in the UAE. Upcoming exhibitions include a group exhibition at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in NY, as part of the exhibition “ Signs: Contemporary Arab Art”.
About Green Art Gallery
Green Art Gallery was founded in 1995 and was amongst the first galleries to exhibit Arab art in Dubai. The Gallery became a primary establishment to nurture the city's earliest art collector base by promoting pioneering artists from across the Middle East and North Africa. Leveraging its long and rich history in the market, Green Art Gallery will also begin to represent and showcase contemporary artists from the region. In this manner the Gallery would become one of the few spaces whose knowledge and expertise has spanned the Arab art movement from modernism and will continue to promote the newest tendencies in the regional contemporary art practices.
Green Art Gallery aims to become not only an exhibition space, but also as a supporter and point of reference for the regional trends in modern and contemporary art practices.
Opening Hours
Saturday- Thursday from 10 am until 9 pm. Closed on Fridays
Contact Info
51st Street, Villa # 23, Jumeirah 1
P.O.Box 257 11
Dubai, UAE
T: + 9714 3449 888
F: + 9714 3447 449
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