Category Archives: Contemporary Art

Interflow: The Art of Emna Zghal

Contemporary Art, Tunisia

INTERFLOW
organized by
The Museum for African Art
Thursday Feb 19th, 2009
5-7pm on the 15th Floor of Ogilvy New York
Worldwide Plaza 309 West 49th St.
RSVP to ogilvyrsvp@gmail.com

Interflow presents recent painting and mixed media works on paper by New York-based artist Emna Zghal. Color and line continually search for boundaries they never find. Forms emerge to take on shapes that feel simultaneously familiar and foreign. Though the canvas fights to act as a boundary, poetic lines overflow into infinite space. Each mark acts in unison with the next to challenge the seemingly simple nature of line itself. Emna Zghal’s artwork elicits a never-ending network of nerves pulsing with colorful abstractions and an energy that suggests organic patterns in a continual search for form. Continue reading Interflow: The Art of Emna Zghal →

Surfs Up Da’wa

Australia, Contemporary Art, YouTube Watch

Sydney art fuses surf with Islam

By Nick Bryant, BBC News, Sydney, December 6, 2008

An Australian artist has produced a range of Islamic surfboards in an attempt to create a greater understanding between East and West.

Phillip George was inspired by his trips to the Middle East and by riots in 2005 when Lebanese Australians were targeted on a beach in Sydney.

He has called the range the Inshallah – or God Willing – surfboards and has put them on exhibition in Sydney.

There are 30 surfboards in all, each adorned with intricate Islamic motifs. Continue reading Surfs Up Da’wa →

Art Against Reason

Contemporary Art, Tunisia

M.Y. ART PROSPECTS is pleased to present Against Reason, a solo exhibition by Emna Zghal.

December 11 – January 17, 2009 | Opening Reception December 11, 6-8PM

Against Reason features Zghal’s latest oil paintings with a smaller selection of prints and watercolors. Drawn from lyrical forms found in nature, she uses a wide spectrum of tones and minute strokes to create highly conceptual, abstract pieces. Turning away from contemporary conventions, she rigorously pursues her idiosyncratic themes of abandonment, lostness, and bewilderment.

Zghal is moved by the brilliant colors of a garden, the subdued beauty of a forest, the reflections within moving water. Her work brings to mind the abstractions of Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell, particularly in her use of repetitive, swirling strokes with careful but unstrained release of color. Continue reading Art Against Reason →

Flora primulaceae

Contemporary Art, Plants, Yemen


Drawing of a Yemeni primula plant by Hugo Haig-Thomas

Hugo Haig-Thomas–A Biography of a Special Artist
Painter and Diplomat of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. of Great Britain

By John Gilbert Bodenstein, President of The European Art Foundation

It is a pleasure to read the biography of Hugo Haig-Thomas, a special artist of our time. Some artists combine their creative activity with a normal career. In Germany Johann Wolfgang Goethe, for example, produced some of his literary works whilst holding an appointment which occupied him during the day. In France the German writer Rainer Maria Rilke was secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin. And the famous European author Ernst Juenger was an officer in both World Wars.

Haig-Thomas likewise was for a number of years a member of Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, but throughout his service he continued to paint and draw. Continue reading Flora primulaceae →

A Turkmen Dismantles Reminders of Old Ruler

Architecture, Central Asia, Contemporary Art


Statue of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s former president, soon to be removed

by By DAVID L. STERN, The New York Times, May 5, 2008

ALMATY, Kazakhstan — A 246-foot tall, rocket ship-like monument to the late ruler of Turkmenistan, topped with a golden statue of himself that rotates to always face the sun, will be removed from the center of the Turkmen capital, state news media there have reported.

A decision by President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov to move the monument was his latest step in dismantling the personality cult of Saparmurat Niyazov, whose often bizarre decrees turned the isolated, energy-rich country into the punch line of a bad international joke.

The president had already reversed Mr. Niyazov’s order renaming the days of the week and months of the year in honor of himself and his family. He had also ended the bans on opera, ballet and the circus, which Mr. Niyazov had decreed un-Turkmen, and lifted restrictions on the Internet. Continue reading A Turkmen Dismantles Reminders of Old Ruler →

Woman Reading

Contemporary Art, Gender and Sexuality

Shadi Ghadrian
Untitled (Qajar Series), 1998
Silver bromide print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Shadi Ghadirian (Iran, b. 1974), who works in the medium of photography, uses her art to express herself as an Iranian and as a woman. Ghadirian’s best-known body of work, the Qajar Series, was inspired by nineteenth-century studio portraits of women depicted in the fashion of the day: thick, black eyebrows; headscarves; and short skirts worn over baggy trousers. In order to re-create the earlier photographic settings, Ghadirian employed painted backdrops and dressed her models in vintage clothing from the late 1800s. She added modern objects to these traditional scenes, such as a Pepsi can, a boom box, or, as in these two images (figs. 61, 62), a bicycle and an avant-garde Tehran newspaper. She has said of her work, “My pictures became a mirror reflecting how I felt: we are stuck between tradition and modernity.”

For the full exhibit on Islamic Art at the Los Angeles Museum of Art, click here.