Hassan Sharif - “Press Conference” at 1×1 contemporary - Januray 2010
Hassan Sharif pursues his art practice free of philosophical investigation, much like the Neo-expressionists that surrounded him in England in the 1980s. Unlike many of this group however, Sharif has never restricted himself to one particular classification or dogma.
The legendary artist has repeatedly been called “the father of conceptual art in the Emirates” despite spending much of his early career being seen as a non-conformist by the local art-world. Now considered to be the first of three generations of “Emirati artists” practicing in the UAE, even this terminology poses its own problems for the artist.
With this in mind we ask ourselves, how is Sharif’s latest body of work to be considered? In his latest solo exhibition at 1×1 art galleries, the main series of canvases (“Press Conference 2008-2009”) depict several figures seemingly shouting or gesturing at the viewer from behind microphones. Painted in thick oil impastos, the aesthetics are ostensibly Edvard Munch meets animator Bill Plympton. Recurring characters include a bald-headed man in the foreground, a suspicious looking bystander in sunglasses behind him and a blonde woman, with bosoms for a body, beside them.
Over the decades Sharif has gained a reputation for his signature “object” installations made up of media as varied as coir, plastic and aluminium that comment on mass-production and consumerism. It may come as a surprise to some then, that paintings constitute the majority of work in this latest exhibition. Sharif maintains that like contemporary artist Gerard Richter, he has never been far from painting. “Over the last two years I have re-explored and concentrated on paintings,” Sharif said in an interview in January 2009. “It is a very basic, initial part of being an artist. I never stopped painting; I am an artist. I am a painter.”
A biennale-sized installation of bound newspapers (Press Conference 2009) that was more typical of Sharif’s style was also on display as part of the series. Curatorially these served to compliment the canvases, whereas a number of paper works entitled “The Mail and The Daily Mail 1983” informed us of Sharif’s longstanding relationship with the media. It is important to note that the artist was also an avid cartoonist for local newspapers in the UAE from 1979-84. This is perhaps where Sharif first explored his ideas on consumption, mass media and art as a commodity. It is this evidently satirical outlook that brings congruence to Sharif’s series as a whole.
One could probe further by asking if these works actually refer to the artist’s recent involvement with the ADACH platform at the Venice Biennale. After all, Sharif and his peers did take part in a number of such press conferences for this event. However, attempting to attribute narrative to Sharif’s paintings would be to misunderstand his methodology entirely. Sharif’s art, in whichever form it takes, is primarily about pluralism and the creation of hand-crafted objects. In “making a painting” he is accepting of all its traditions, yet it is neither about visual experience nor is it about inspiration. Sharif does not use particular colours to symbolize specific meanings, nor does he paint particular subject matter to send messages.
In Sharif’s case, as Joseph Kosuth aptly put it, “Art indeed exists for its own sake.” Coming to the end of “Press Conference” and seeming to have formed some semblance of Sharif’s exhibition, I then turned a corner to see a final piece entitled “After the press conference no 4.” A starkly deviant painting of a cow in a field with several over-sized tomatoes embedded in it confronts the onlooker, no-doubt to much amusement. With this, we are once again reminded that we ought not to get too comfortable in our analysis of Sharif, for this is an artist beyond banal rationalization.
Only the artist’s own conceptual words would seem to do justice to his art, “I am cultivating people’s way of thinking…the psychology of the society. It is do with culture and agriculture. You don’t paint a tree, you grow a tree.”
