Athier Mousawi @ Ayyam Gallery, Dubai - All Things Come Apart

Athier Mousawi: All Things Come Apart
Ayyam Gallery, Dubai
23 January – 8 March 2018

ATHIER MOUSAWI

All Things Come Apart 9 (detail), 2017

Acrylic on linen canvas, 180 x 167 cm

Ayyam Gallery Dubai (DIFC) presents All Things Come Apart, a solo presentation of paintings by Athier Mousawi.

All Things Come Apart explores the changing of state from order to disorder, attempting to capture the perfect composition that harmoniously exists in between. In these new works the artist makes a number of aesthetic and conceptual shifts – a departure from his more recognisable amalgamation of geometric and free flowing, boldly colourful forms.

Rather than using loose shapes, squiggles, and structural lines to simply capture ideas on discarded bits of paper, these preliminary marks have become the very basis of the works. Seamlessly fused with bubbles, material textures, geometric shapes, and bodily elements, the artist creates layers for his floating and spacious compositions. One of the main constructs within these works is the newly introduced three dimensional elevation. The introduction of this to his scenes adds a surrealist mood to the works: the treatment of shadows and the weighing of the elements somehow create a believability to the fantastical and impossible arrangement of forms, floating in a dreamlike space.

Athier Mousawi’s definitive idea of what ‘futuristic’ looked like was strongly fused with the Metaphysical Painting movement, the Futurists, and the Memphis movements throughout Europe in the early twentieth century, as well as early visual effects defined by the late 80s and early 90s aesthetic: bright colours and crude grid-based computer animation. The play between colours and elements within these works try to echo this transitional effect.

ATHIER MOUSAWI

Athier Mousawi (b.1982) is a British Iraqi visual artist whose work over recent years has centred on posing unanswerable questions against undefined answers and forming a visual narrative between the two. Since graduating with an MA in Design and Illustration from Central St. Martins, London in 2007, the subject of much of his work has been Iraq and his diasporic relationship to his intrinsic yet foreign homeland.

Separate to his artistic practice, Athier Mousawi has worked extensively as an educator in the United Kingdom and abroad. For three consecutive years, beginning in 2007, Athier worked as a British Museum Arab Artist in Residence, working in schools throughout the UK. In 2011, he was selected to serve as the Chasing Mirrors Artist in Residence at the National Portrait Gallery, leading workshops in community centres across London. Athier has also worked in a number of refugee camps as a workshop leader in Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan, and in 2014 was invited by the Palestinian Museum as a Visiting Artist to conduct workshops with children in the West Bank. In 2015, he was selected to work at the artist-run interdisciplinary space Beirut Art Residency.

Selected solo and group exhibitions include Ayyam Gallery Beirut (2017), Ayyam Gallery Dubai (2016), Nest Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland (2014), Ayyam Gallery London (2014), Edge of Arabia, London, UK and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (2013), Cuadro Fine Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2013), National Portrait Gallery, London, UK (2011), The Royal Academy, London, UK (2011), Tashkent International Art Biennale, Tashkent, Uzbekistan (2011).

AYYAM GALLERY
Gate Village 3, DIFC, Dubai
www.ayyamgallery.com