The Aisha Alabbar Gallery has opened Mohammed Al Mazrouei’s largest exhibition to date – a long-awaited examination of the Egyptian-Emirati painter’s important work.

Al Mazrouei’s works revolve around one subject in particular: the female form, which he sculpts in serene, animal poses or paints in expressive, jagged brushstrokes. Colored eyelashes – applied liberally later in her career – shape faces and scenes. Animals also appear, as do characters from folk tales the Cairo-born artist heard as a child.

In all of these works, large expressive eyes are the focal point. Immobile and carefully reworked, they are the constants in the middle of the anxiety of his canvases.

The almost primal level of angst in the works – his exhibit is simply titled “No” – goes back to the traumatic loss of his mother at a young age. Al Mazrouei explains that the event informs what he calls his “visual dictionary” of repeated symbols such as the X and his many depictions of the female form.

It also launched him into a reflection on what it means to be a woman and led him, a voracious reader, to the writings of Carl Jung. He was inspired in particular by Jung’s idea of ​​archetypes, or the theory that a collective subconscious, shared among people regardless of their culture, produces constants of behavior, attitudes and symbols.

Among these are the anima and animus, or the feminine side of a man and the masculine side of a woman, which are often suppressed and thus appear out of control, like a river seeking an alternative path. For Al Mazrouei, it is in the idea of ​​femininity, full of desire and passion and aware of the potential for transformation.

“My work imagines unconstrained truths about life and its many mysteries as a means of pure expression,” he says. “Primitive or fundamental human instincts that are not conditioned by social systems channel every expression, while a conscious awareness of reality warps, hinting at other mysteries.”

The folktale characters are also a nod to a more age-old way of approaching life’s twists and turns.

In an untitled acrylic and pastel work from 2015, a gray horned figure appears to hover behind a woman as she slips on — or slips off — a skirt. A shadow of death or a mighty of evil, his hand bends over two of the others the women in the picture, whose full bellies make them look pregnant. Ambiguity is as much a tool here as the general feeling of anxiety.

Elsewhere, farm dogs and birds are treated the same as men and women, in a quietly argued equivalence between human and animal: two images from a series of portraits from 2016, extracted and exhibited at Alabbar, commemorate a man alongside a an expressive dog with a long face.

“Folk tales and myths were popular where I grew up and sometimes I reflect that objectively as a way to explain a mystery in dreams, spirits, animals and creatures,” says Al Mazrouei. “The outcome remains a mystery, like creating a world you don’t understand.”

Some of the later work’s dissolution looks overworked and it’s the earlier portraits, with a slower, calmer feel, that are the stunners. A superb portrait from 1987 (Untitled 117) shows a figure made up of blocks of color, with dark orange, white, and black shading on its body, and a forehead swept in bright blue.

The character’s hair is indistinguishable from the background, and a strange white cloud emanating from its mouth suggests either a puff, smoke, or breath. The painting is economically constructed in terms of colors – a patch of orange also appears on the figure’s shoulder, while black borders the side of his face and the canvas – and it’s extraordinary to see the colors do so much. The orange signals a kind of visual punch at first glance, while circling the shaded eye, the sketchy depiction of which suggests destabilization or loss of equanimity or even the aftermath of violence.

Al Mazrouei was born in Tanta, Egypt in 1962 and became involved in intellectual circles in the small university town. He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1986 and played a crucial role in the early days of the Cultural Foundation, where he worked in the culture and arts department. Perhaps more importantly, he participated in the amorphous and social aspect of the foundation, in which ideas around painting, poetry, film and other art forms mixed freely. For example, Al Mazrouei wrote poetry and made films alongside his practice of painting.

He then returned to Cairo and has lived there ever since, but recently reappeared in the United Arab Emirates as a former statesman. The BAIT15 collective took up residence in their home in central Abu Dhabi and included their first-ever video on their inaugural show. In 2018, he and artist Hashel Al Lamki – who occupied Al Mazrouei’s studio as part of BAIT15 – collaborated on a series of works, featured in NYUAD Art Gallery’s Project Space.

A rare example of a cross between generations, Al Lamki and Al Mazrouei painted together a huge canvas the size of a history painting, Obsession with exterminationwhich shows a slaughterhouse, the bloodied face of a snarling cat and a (relatively) sterile kitchen – a jamboree of gore and gore, perpetrated by both humans and animals, which is anchored by five figures doing clumsily, almost guiltily, facing the viewer.

Al Mazrouei recently signed with Aisha Alabbar Gallery, a newcomer to Dubai, and the gallery has taken on the daunting task of cataloging his work. It can currently be found in major collections in the United Arab Emirates, such as that of the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism, the Barjeel Art Foundation and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, but its importance and the role of culture more broadly first cultural foundation is only beginning to make itself felt. be explored.

A small collection of exhibition catalogs and brochures at the gallery is in the process of being started and the forthcoming catalog raisonné will, expectedly, give an even deeper insight into what was done and shown in the early art scene. contemporary with the capital.

Mohammed Al Mazrouei: NO is at the Aisha Alabbar Gallery until May 29, 2022. More information is available at aishaalabbar.art

Updated: March 26, 2022, 08:17