Hassan Sharif

Hassan Sharif (1 January 1951 – 18 September 2016) was an Emirati artist and prolific writer.

He lived and worked in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

He is widely regarded as a central figure in contemporary and conceptual art in the region, often known as the father of conceptual art in the Gulf.

He founded Al Marijah Art Atelier, and through his extensive work and writings, he inspired the next generation of artists in the United Arab Emirates.

His work is represented in major public collections, such as the Guggenheim New York, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Centre Pompidou, Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and Sharjah Art Foundation.

Sharif’s early ‘caricatures’ were printed in the UAE’s nascent newspapers and magazines from 1973 to 1979, and reflected on the political climate of the Middle East in the 1970s as well as the UAE’s rapid urbanisation and commercial globalisation since its formation.

Sharif’s first public exhibition was at Dubai’s Central Public Library in 1976, showing his early ‘Caricature’ cartoons.

Subsequently he participated in group shows at, amongst other venues, Whitechapel Gallery, London, New Museum, New York, and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

By the time Sharif left the UAE in 1979 to pursue a formal art education, he had actively rejected calligraphic abstraction and Arab Nationalism, both of which were the dominant discourse in the region at that time, as well as the ‘negative irony’ of his early cartoons.

"I had had some experience from creating the Caricatures but when I went to Britain I wanted to clean that away; to forget or ignore what I had been doing before. [...] I just wanted to be around new ideas and whatever new was happening."

A monograph of his career, Hassan Sharif Experiments & Objects 1979-2011, was curated by Catherine David and Mohammed Kazem at Qasr Al Hosn, Abu Dhabi, in 2011.

After a foundation year studying in Leamington Spa, Sharif enrolled at the Byam Shaw School of Art (today part of Central Saint Martins) in 1980 and came under the influence of artist Tam Giles, head of the Abstract and Experimental Department.

This led to an interest in British Constructionism and particularly Kenneth Martin’s notion of ‘chance and order’, which Sharif developed into his own ‘Semi-system’ way of working – based around arbitrary or over-elaborate systems that are then followed to create works, often on a grid, from ‘Body and Squares’ (1983) to meticulously recording sentences read in a newspaper at points along a journey to Sharjah, to long sequences of black lines showing transformations of a line within a square.

"I think of these markings as more of an engagement than an arrangement […] The important thing is the process."

Art as absurdist, process-based activity also fed Sharif’s early performances enacted in London and on return trips to the UAE during summer holidays – jumping in the desert, tying rope between rocks, and discussing art in the toilets of Byam Shaw School of Art with a member of the faculty.

"For instance, I speak while my mouth is full of bread. I take a sip of water. I eat more bread, speak, drink some more water, and so on, recording all the sounds. All the while I'm talking about serious things like politics and art, but it's an ironic delivery, imitating politicians and lecturers."

Sharif graduated in 1984 and set about staging the first exhibitions of contemporary art in the Emirates.

He founded Al Marijah Art Atelier in Sharjah in 1984, a meeting place for a generation of young artists in the country, and assembled several interventions around the city including ‘One Day Exhibition’ (1985) and an impromptu exhibition in the city’s central market.

In this period, Sharif also penned numerous articles in the UAE’s nascent press about the history of art and translated into Arabic excerpts of 20th-century art manifestos and texts (notably about Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Orphism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism, Constructivism, Fluxus, Arte Povera, Minimalism and Conceptual Art) so as to provoke a local engagement and show that his work is grounded in a discourse.

"I didn’t only make art but I made my audience too. I had to contextualise what I was doing."

In addition to his own practice, Sharif founded the Art Atelier in the Youth Theater and Arts, Dubai.

He supported several generations of artists in the Emirates, authored books, and wrote over fifty essays on art.

Sharif’s works are held in notable institutional collections including M+, Hong Kong; Guggenheim New York; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; and the Sharjah Art Foundation.

In 2006, Sharif released an essay titled ‘Weaving’, which detailed the ideas that first initiated these objects, responding to what he calls a "vulgar market mentality that flooded shops with consumer goods".

"Despite the fact that my works are based on a sequential, industrial mode of creativity, they also demolish the sequential autonomy of an industrial product. I inject my works with a realism that exposes this socio-political economic monster, allowing people a chance to recognise the danger of over indulgence in this form of negative consumption."

Sharif continued to create objects throughout his career, but challenged the form throughout, at various times incorporating paintings, works on paper into the assemblage and using the form to create more figurative works.

In 2007, Abdulraheem Sharif—who has been documenting and storing the artworks of Hussein and Hassan Sharif, as well as other artists since early 90s—decided to turn his former house into a space to showcase the artworks he was warehousing, and the ones that were with the Emirati artists.

Hassan Sharif encouraged his brother’s idea, and by January 2008, the space was ready.

Mohamed Kazem curated it, and Jose Clevers gave it the name, The Flying House.

Hassan lived in The Flying House from 2008 to 2013, where he also set up his studio there during that period.

From the early ‘80s, Sharif began creating assemblages from cheap, mass-produced materials or items sourced from the UAE’s markets.

With these heaps – often large in scale – Sharif was handing back as artwork the surplus of a recently and rapidly-industrialised UAE.

Similarly, "as illustrations of meaningless [sic], taking Duchampian philosophy to heart, they were crafted from commonplace materials, cut, bound or tied together with rope or wire, and thus stripped of their original function."

His subsequent assemblages have incorporated coir, rope, copper wire, readymade domestic products, a crutch, newspapers dipped in glue and papier-mache.

The process of bundling these objects together – ‘weaving’, as Sharif calls it – has had extraordinary influence on his broader practice, both in the repetitive gesture of tying to the rudimentary handmade nature of the process.

"It’s important for me that art is easy, and technically anyone can do it. In that sense, my work is skill-less. I mean, you don't need special skills to make work that becomes art. I don't want the sculptures to appear to result from virtuosity. I'm not trying to make magic of some kind that would impress an audience as to how the work is created. There are no secrets."

In 2014, Sharif began working with mass-produced images – bundling together printouts, glossy magazines and pages from books, as well as illustrations from a dictionary recreated at an exaggerated scale in iron and ‘woven’ together as assemblage.

Sharif died on 18 September 2016 in Dubai.

He was 65.

Sharif exhibited in the Giardini della Biennale (Venice) at the 57th Venice Biennale, VIVA ARTE VIVA, Italy (2017), curated by Christine Macel.