A window onto ‘the vast horizons’ of Hassan Sharif

In 1985, four artists living and working in the United Arab Emirates published a short statement in the art magazine Al Tashkeel, under the title ‘To Contemplate Is to Lay a Foundation’.

The text was a rallying cry for an Arab art that would embrace the future while holding on to the traditions of the past. It was to be an art that opened the viewer ‘to the vast horizons, without forgetting the importance of attending to the authentic and the contemporary’.

Abdul Jalil Jawad, Abdulraheem Salim, Abdullatif Al-Smoudi and Hassan Sharif were living in a time of rapid development. The UAE, which had been founded in 1971, was expanding at an almost incomprehensible rate. The artists believed they had a role to play in shocking society out of its torpor to engage with the changing economic and cultural realities.

‘A true artist is one whose true concern is with writing his name on the mural of the future,’ they wrote. ‘It is a voice — will it be echoed?’

Central to this ‘Wake up, sleepwalkers!’ call was Hassan Sharif (1951-2016), a dynamic individual recently returned from the United Kingdom, who had co-founded the Emirates Fine Arts Society.

Sharif had studied at Byam Shaw School of Art in London, where he had become interested in British Constructivism, as well as participating in Fluxus ‘happenings’ with their focus on chance, repetition and audience participation. Back in the Gulf, he translated these ‘anti-art’ tenets into an experimental practice that had a profound influence on other artists in the region.

Ridha Moumni, Christie’s Deputy Chairman, Middle East and North Africa and curator of the upcoming exhibition, says that the artist was a pioneer. ‘He was making new forms of art that didn’t exist in the UAE and the Gulf.’

A significant group of the artist’s works will be offered for sale in Emirati Art Reimagined: Hassan Sharif and the Contemporary Voices, within a wider exhibition curated by Moumni — Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World — on show at Christie’s in London from 20 July to 23 August 2023.

Sharif’s early works included Constructivist drawings, colour experiments, and happenings in which he performed mundane actions — such as jumping repeatedly or throwing stones in the desert — to highlight the connections between art and the everyday. ‘Children jump while playing, men jump with parachutes and people jump on the beach,’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t I jump in the desert?’

Later, he constructed vibrant assemblages out of cheap consumer items such as sandals, plastic toys and copper tubes. ‘I’m both the consumer and the producer,’ he remarked of these artworks, which embodied his idea of ‘urban archaeology’.

Born in Bandar Lengeh, Iran, in 1951, Sharif grew up in Dubai. He began his career as a cartoonist for the weekly news magazine Akhbar Dubai  before moving to the UK to study fine art.

Moumni explains that this early engagement with politics never left him: ‘He was a sharp observer of current events, and he had a critical eye when it came to assessing the relationship between politics and the mass media.’

The artist’s biting satire can be seen in the painting series ‘Press Conference’, in which dead-eyed politicians, overshadowed by sinister secret-service types, are depicted as redundant entities speaking into the void, their gaping mouths a black hole, emphasising the emptiness of their promises.

In the mid-1980s, Sharif took the principles of Fluxus and applied them to sculpture and painting, producing hundreds of little cardboard structures and colour charts. ‘Art is not about expression, nostalgic feelings, romantic or utopian. Art is a decision. I decide when and how to work,’ he said.

Moumni says that these strange little objects were as much about performance as they were about creation: ‘His works had an urban, industrial quality and were concerned with the symbolism of the object and its transformation in the context of consumer culture. His art also reflects on his physical autonomy and the role of the hand of the artist.’ In this respect, Sharif echoed the view of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, who believed that manual labour conferred dignity upon creative work.

‘He was a mentor, a teacher and an intellectual with a highly complex mind,’ says Moumni, who cites the many organisations Sharif founded in his 40-year career, among them the Al Marijah Art Atelier and The Flying House in Al Quoz, an experimental laboratory promoting the work of Emirati artists. ‘It is an utterly unique cultural space, a “proto-museum”, which has no comparison in the region,’ says the curator.

Sharif was a mentor to a younger group of artists, among them Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim and Mohammed Kazem, who also feature in the Christie’s exhibition.

The artist continued to work until his untimely death in 2016. The following year he was commemorated in a posthumous exhibition at the Venice Biennale: Hassan Sharif Studio (Supermarket), 1990-2016. This was a wondrous installation of shelves packed with sculptural assemblages made from items such as neatly stapled sheets of paper, deflated footballs and colourful silicon moulds — an artistic echo of the jumble of everyday life in Dubai at the turn of the 21st century.

‘He never stopped creating, producing, and reflecting on the local material culture and its relationship with the visual landscape,’ says Moumni. ‘He was exceptional in his approach, and in the different forms of art he created or reshaped. He experimented with an artistic freedom unlike that of any artist before him, and he challenged the frontiers of the practice in his cultural context and throughout the Arab world.’

From 20 July to 23 August 2023, Christie’s will host  Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, the largest exhibition of Arab art in London​, including  Emirati Art Reimagined: Hassan Sharif and the Contemporary Voices, a loan and selling exhibition, and  Kawkaba: Highlights from the Barjeel Art Foundation. Held in partnership with the Barjeel Art Foundation and the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Culture and Youth