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When the Brooklyn Museum announced its appointment of Kristen Windmuller-Luna as a consulting curator of African Art in late March a heated debate ensued about the lack of diversity among curatorial staff in American museums, and the “tone deaf” nature of hiring a white scholar to oversee a vast..

Karim Sultan—the director of the Barjeel Art Foundation—organized Between Two Rounds of Fire, the Exile of the Sea as an attempt to demonstrate how artists from the Arab world address “violence, power, and structure.” For the curator, violence is not only limited to political conflict b..

2017 proved to be an exciting if not bewildering year in art across the globe. As the art market waned in places like Dubai it remained strong in the usual centers, particularly as auction records soared. Large-scale art events aimed at drawing crowds, and generating revenue, were similarly hit ..

In a 1926 manifesto, Kazimir Malevich identified the use of geometry in modern abstract painting as achieving “the zero of form.” This phrase not only describes the absence of recognizable subject matter but also suggests the process of minimizing a composition based on essential pictorial eleme..

Safwan Dahoul’s recent paintings indicate several new developments in his ongoing Dream series, the influential body of work that has distinguished his career. Although the psychologically laden paintings are widely exhibited and collected, little is known about the origins of the series other t..

At the 2016 edition of Art Dubai Modern, Samia Halaby will be featured in The Mechanics of Nature, an exhibition organized by Ayyam Gallery that explores historical developments in abstract..

For nearly ten years, Oussama Diab has worked through various painting styles, often combining different forms and techniques in a single composition. In neo-expressionist paintings that reimagine Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503-06), for example, Diab repaints the sixteenth-century po..

For more than twenty years, Kareem Risan has depicted his surroundings as richly painted surfaces free of temporal or spatial boundaries. Without references to the hermetic space of the canvas (or paper), Risan employs color as a compositional directive. The artist’s varying treatment of paint i..

Within a few years of joining Kuwait’s Free Atelier in 1959, Sami Mohammad created a collection of paintings and sculptures that would determine the direction of his art over the next five decades. As one of the studio’s first artists, he was given a stipend by the Kuwaiti government that allowe..

US-based artists of the Arab diaspora who have explored the interventionist potential of new media have often done so within the context of the American spectacle: a reality in which life is reduced to mere representation and social interactions and civic engagement are mediated through mass med..

Sahand Hesamiyan’s Khalvat (2014) resembles a futuristic vessel. Composed of a circular shell, the thin ribs that begin at the work’s oculus create a sense of propulsion as they extend into narrow piers. With triangular pieces adjoined to its lattice frame at forty-five degree angles, the..

Syrian artist Khaled Takreti has spent the greater part of his twenty-year career exploring a personal history that stretches between Beirut, where he was born in 1964; Damascus, where he lived before moving to the United States in his early thirties; and Paris, where he has resided since 2004. ..

[Syria’s Apex Generation highlights post-uprising art as an introduction to the rich history of painting in Syria. Featuring the works of Abdul Karim Majdal Al-Beik, Nihad Al Turk, Othman Moussa, Mohannad Orabi, and Kais Salman, the exhibition and its accompanying publication explore a new sc..

[Syria’s Apex Generation highlights post-uprising art as an introduction to the rich history of painting in Syria. Featuring the works of Abdul Karim Majdal Al-Beik, Nihad Al Turk, Othman Moussa, Mohannad Orabi, and Kais Salman, the exhibition and its accompanying publication explore a new sc..

Since the start of her artistic practice over a decade ago, Nadia Ayari has engaged painting and the history of its development with marked intensity and seriousness. Adding to the complexity that one finds in her usage of the medium is her subject matter, which is not easily decipherable; figur..