Hassan Sharif

Biography

Hassan Sharif’s first exhibition opened in 1976 at the Central Public Library in Dubai. It showed caricatures.

He was born on 1 January 1951 in Bandar Lengeh. From 1973 to 1979 his drawings appeared in the first newspapers and magazines of the Emirates, responding to the political climate of the Middle East in the 1970s and to the country’s rapid urbanisation. When he left in 1979 to study art, he had already rejected both calligraphic abstraction and Arab nationalism, the dominant currents in the region at the time, as well as the “negative irony” of his own cartoons. He said later that in Britain he wanted to “clean all that away” and be around new ideas. After a foundation year in Leamington Spa, in 1980 he enrolled at the Byam Shaw School of Art (today part of Central Saint Martins). There he came under the influence of Tam Giles, head of the Abstract and Experimental Department. This led to an interest in British Constructionism, in particular Kenneth Martin’s idea of “chance and order”. Sharif turned it into a method of his own, which he called the “Semi-system”: an arbitrary or over-elaborate system was devised, and the work was made by following its rules, often on a grid. Among such pieces are “Body and Squares” (1983), records of sentences read in a newspaper at different points on a journey to Sharjah, and long sequences of black lines showing the transformations of a line within a square. “The important thing is the process,” he said.

The same spirit of absurdist action marks his early performances in London and in the Emirates during summer holidays: jumping in the desert, a rope tied between rocks, a discussion of art in the toilets of the Byam Shaw School with a member of the faculty. In one performance he spoke with his mouth full of bread, took a sip of water, ate again and spoke again, recording all the sounds, and serious subjects, politics and art, were delivered with irony, in imitation of politicians and lecturers.

In 1984 he graduated and set about staging the first exhibitions of contemporary art in the Emirates. That same year the Al Marijah Art Atelier appeared in Sharjah, a meeting place for the country’s young artists; it hosted the One Day Exhibition (1984), and a year later came a second One Day Exhibition and an impromptu exhibition in the city’s central market. In these years Sharif wrote articles on the history of art for the young Emirati press and translated into Arabic excerpts from twentieth-century manifestos and texts: on Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Orphism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism, Constructivism, Fluxus, Arte Povera, Minimalism and Conceptual Art. He wanted to provoke a local response and to show that his work was grounded in a discourse. “I didn’t only make art but I made my audience too,” he said. He also founded an art atelier at the Youth Theatre and Arts in Dubai, supported several generations of Emirati artists, wrote books and published more than fifty essays on art.

From the early 1980s he built assemblages from cheap, mass-produced materials and items found in the markets of the Emirates: heaps of such objects, often large, handed back as artwork the surplus of a rapidly industrialised country. The things were cut, bound with rope or wire, and so lost their former function. Later he used coir, copper wire, ready-made household goods, a crutch, newspapers dipped in glue and papier-mâché. He called this bundling “weaving” and in 2006 published an essay of that name, explaining that he was responding to a “vulgar market mentality” that had flooded the shops with consumer goods. He insisted that art should be easy and open to anyone, and that his work was “skill-less” and should not look like the product of virtuosity. In 2014 he began bundling mass-produced images as well: printouts, glossy magazines, pages from books, while illustrations from a dictionary were recreated at exaggerated scale in iron.

From 2008 to 2013 Sharif lived in The Flying House in Dubai and set up a studio there. The non-profit space had been created in 2007 by his brother Abdulraheem Sharif, who for many years had been storing the work of Hassan, Hussein Sharif and other artists; Mohamed Kazem was the curator, and Jose Clevers gave the space its name. The house closed in 2013.

The major retrospective, “Hassan Sharif: Experiments & Objects 1979–2011”, was held in 2011 at Qasr Al Hosn in Abu Dhabi, curated by Catherine David and Mohammed Kazem. Sharif took part in the UAE national pavilion at the Venice Biennale twice: at its debut in 2009 and again in 2015. In 2010 he was the first Emirati to show at the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. Group exhibitions took place at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the New Museum in New York and the Centre Pompidou. His solo shows of 2016 were held at Mathaf (“Objects and Files”) and at Alexander Gray Associates in New York.

He died on 18 September 2016, aged 65. His exhibition “I Am The Single Work Artist” was shown after his death in Sharjah (2017), Berlin (2019), Malmö (2020) and Saint-Étienne (2021), and in 2017 his work was shown at the 57th Venice Biennale.