CANVAS GUIDE

ONE ON ONE

Nazif Topcuoglu's 'Innerscapes' running at Dubai's Green Art Gallery from 11 January - 5 March presents recent works by the Turkish photographer. Canvas speaks with the artist about his artistic process, inherent symbolism and creative influences.

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Unlike your previous works which portray adolescent women in highly theatrical backdrops, the photographs on show in Innerscapes depict underplayed background and seemingly mature subjects. What sparked this evolution? The narrative in my earlier works centres on young women - students mostly - who are discovering the world, reading about it and exploring it. This series shows them grown up and confronting personal, social and political problems of everyday life. Now that they have graduated per se and are out in the world, what they find is not what they expected, so they are questioning everything around them. There are two thematic groups in this exhibition: the images depicting one or two subjects such as A Pre-Raphaelite Picture, Drag...

REVIEW

Marwan Sahmarani: Marks of Being

Lebanese artist Marwan Sahmarani makes a departure from his socio-political oeuvre to focus on his personal experience of fatherhood in "Marie Marie, the devil in me has taken you for a ride", his show at Lawrie Shabibi Gallery running until 16 February.

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Thick impasto coupled with bold and lurid colours cover the canvases of Marwan Sahmarani's recent work. His thick layers of paint exude a sense of rhythm and movement giving life to the abstract forms which shape his characters: his wife and newly born child. At once intimate and introspective as well as dramatic and erotically charged, these new works go beyond their subject matter to convey existential thoughts on life, death, relationships and the nature of being. At first glance, the figurative placement of Sahmarani's subjects recalls 16th century Renaissance representations of the Madonna and Child. The artist's wife is found embracing the newborn infant often with a lurking male figure in the background evoking such works as the Don...

ONE TO WATCH

What Lies Beneath

The changing face of water in the works of Nicene Kossentini.

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Water is a fundamental part of our existence, both life-giving and treacherous, and for Tunisian artist Nicene Kossentini, it has long played an integral part in her oeuvre, an overriding presence that ripples, blurs and washes away. In her 2007 video La Disparation, for example, a piano player dissolves into wavelets that blur and distort his image. In What The Water Gave Me (2009), faces are indistinct, submerged in "a matrix in which the body is dissolved". For Kossentini, water - whether through its presence or absence - is an element that plays as much a part in her tableaux as the characters she depicts. "[Water] dominates the picture, yet I do not consider it to be a character, per se, but rather an environment or container," she exp...

ARTIST INTERVIEW: AL BRAITHWAITE

Mirrors as well as portraits of Middle Eastern royalty are found in the works displayed in Transgressions, your current exhibition at XVA Gallery. What made you choose such a medium and technique for these new works?

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The technique sheds light on my creative process and the way that I look at the different events and objects that surround me. I aim to create artworks that can hold many positions simultaneously. In the pieces in Transgressions, the viewer looks at their reflection in the mirror and sees something in front of them that they don't expect. The mirrors are a good technique to bring the viewer into the picture and engage them with the artwork, thus creating an interactive dialogue. Most of my work is about trying to get beyond the extreme of two polarities - both thematically and technically. In the portrait works, one of the main polarities is the position of the infant embodied by the colourful drawing and the ancestor, represented ...