Rolling out the new season in style, Anima Gallery, The Pearl, has announced Collective Exhibition 2016, an exhibition of nine contemporary artists from Lebanon, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Spain, and Iran, which opens today (Thursday) and is on through October 30.
Featuring top artistes such as Peter Zimmermann, Ali Hassan, Masakatsu Sashie, Said Baalbaki, Tsi Wei Chen, Aurora Canero, Starsky Brines, Kambiz Sharif, and Timo Nasseri, the exhibition is sure to draw a big crowd in the coming days. Anima Gallery gives us a lowdown on the artists whose works will adorn its bright white walls, starting today.
Noted German contemporary abstract artist Zimmermann has been most feted for his blob paintings and book cover paintings. Zimmermann’s way of working – his medium essentially involves airbrushing combined with digital arts – is rather peculiar. Often drawing his source material from texts or book covers, he scans them into his computer, tweaks them using Photoshop and other such digital manipulation toolboxes, and eventually gets the resultant image onto a canvas, which bears nearly no resemblance to the source image.
Following application of “numerous strata of pigmented and dyed acrylic resin to the support,” he transforms the contents into “palpable and mellifluous bodies” of light and colour. In an interview earlier this year, Zimmermann had told Community, “In the beginning, I was very careful about trying to find a balance between hardly recognising the source image and retaining its traces as hints. As time went by, I thought that I could more or less do away with the origin, the source image. So what I have tried to focus on is to have an interesting abstraction which works as a painting itself.”
Born in 1974 in city of Kanazawa in Ishikawa Prefecture, Masakatsu Sashie’s signature orb paintings of the “fictional world, filled with futuristic warnings about human’s tendencies for environmental dominance and over-consumption,” are as much a source for wide-eyed wonder as they are a trigger for a flood of questions, curiosities and concerns.
Sashie’s gently-floating massive orbs are created out of scraps of old constructions from the Showa-period – a period of enlightened peace and harmony, period of radiant Japan during the time of reign of the Sh?wa Emperor, Hirohito, from 1926 to 1989 – and pieces of mass production and mass consumption culture, explains a note on the exhibition. Things like vending machines, pachinko parlours or fast food signs and video game components are woven into Masakatsu’s imagery in his orb painting.
Lebanese artist Said Baalbaki explores themes of historical accuracy, institutional power and social memory feature in his artwork. Painter and interdisciplinary artist Baalbaki is based in Berlin. Initially known for painted works that drew on his experiences as a child during the Lebanese Civil War and Israeli occupation, Baalbaki’s paintings, often devoid of people, portray piles of items such as suitcases, shoes, clothing and other belongings, symbolising lost, unrecorded and forgotten stories of history.
A conceptual shift in Baalbaki’s work occurred in 2006 when he began to examine the role of museums and institutions in guiding dominant perceptions of history. His ongoing project ‘Al Buraq’ is a fictional museum display charting the discovery of remains of the winged horse with a human head that is part of the Islamic tradition.
Aurora Canero has been working in bronze for more than 30 years. Born and educated in Spain, she creates poetic and whimsical meditations on the human spirit. Her figures transcend the physical properties of solidified metal and take on a life and emotional character to themselves. They are constantly confronting a moment of truth, whether about themselves or the world surrounding them, and emanate a mysterious trepidation between what just happened, a past barely hinted at, and what is going to happen next.
Timo Nasseri began his artistic career as a photographer. Born in Berlin in 1972 to a German mother and an Iranian father, Nasseri, in 2004, made the transition to creating sculpture. Combining Islamic and western cultural heritages, his work is inspired as much by specific memories and religious references as by universal archetypes described by mathematics and language, and the inner truths of form and rhythm.
Born in 1978 in Tabriz, Iran, Kambiz Sharif, during his teenage years, developed an interest in art, taking pictures and drawing sketches and using different materials, clay, wood, etc. to make models. From 1992 to 1996, he attended the Mirak Arts School in Tabriz, earning his Art Diploma. After graduation, Sharif moved to Tehran where he opened a studio and began working in sculpture full-time, using form to express his thoughts and feelings. Sharif opened his own sculptural school in 2001 with classes in clay, wood, stone, and in bronze casting. Sharif migrated to Vancouver, Canada, just over two years ago, and has started a new life, opening a studio in Vancouver where he continues his sculptural practice.
Taiwan’s Tsi Wei Chen, in the process of making artistic creation, always tries to get rid of the habitual rational judgement, and with a different angle, uses his heart to experience the inspiration given by the people, events, and objects of surrounding reality. When an artistic creation takes shape gradually with the rise and fall of thought in one’s mind, one can discover the beauty constantly during the process, believes Chen.