Beirut

Sfeir-Semler Gallery is happy to announce the opening of the solo show by the Emirati artist, Hassan Sharif. We will be presenting early work from the 70s and 80s along with new works from the last few years. Hassan Sharif started making art in the 1970s and only in the last few years is receiving long overdue recognition. Sharif was born in 1951 in what is now modern day Dubai. He has been a witness to the transformation of this region from a largely nomadic backwater to a consumerist hub and has documented this through installation, painting, sculpture, drawing and performance, in a career which has spanned five decades.

Sharif’s early work often took the form of the execution of a simple action – washing, reading, measuring – and having the process photographed by his friends. In the absence of any artistic or creative infrastructure, Sharif documented and archived his own work, compiling on sheets of cardboard photographs, sketches, and notes.In the early eighty's, Sharif combined his interest in performance and experimental practice with a meticulous study of form, geometry and colour, showing an interest in the power of repetition. This would later translate into his installation works heaping objects in large stacks. These haphazard stacks, are made up of mass produced domestic objects, often imported from China or India.