Under the Patronage of H.E. Shaikh Rashid bin Khalifa AlKhalifa

 

Albareh proudly presents “Fifty Years of Printmaking”, an exhibition by the prominent Sudanese painter Mohammed Omar Khalil, showcasing for the first time, a retrospective of his print-making work in etching, between the mid 1960s and the late 2000s. 

 

The official opening will be on the 19th of January,2014 at 7p.m. The exhibition will run until the 15th of February,2013.

 

The works, many of which had never been exhibited before, present us with an alternative reading of the painter’s entire career, not only as a traveler between cultures and epochs – as we had seen in his works about Florentine painter Paolo Ucello in the 2000s – but a re-interpreter of the meaning of visual culture in general: He attempts to re-locate sensorial experience elsewhere than with the pure colors that characterize the postmodern, hereby searching in the black, for a warmer place where his book of art and life meets the viewer.   

Applying a traditional technique acquired from European print-makers from earlier centuries, Khalil’s etchings on black represent with vividness all his pictorial periods, from the early student days investigating modern art through his numerous travels, the experiments with abstract figures, and ultimately renditions of tributes to modern music and classical painting. Withdrawing from the visual field, the artist is opening the possibility of entering the world with an altogether different morphology, causing apparently unrelated elements to collide into each other and emerge as distinct syntactic compositions. A precise amalgamation between folkloric elements and handicraft, and the timeless quality of art history, give birth to composite worlds with life of their own.

Mohammed Omar Khalil has been both a pioneer and role model in print-making throughout the region, and one of the most important living artists working on the format that he has as well taught in prestigious American universities, such as Columbia and the Parsons School of Design at the New School. Staying away from the minimal and abstract that shaped his generation, the artist has developed a grammar of his own, excavating surfaces of consciousness and presenting them as narrative sequences in snapshots that might be arranged differently each time we observe them. The forty years encompassed in this exhibition are by no means a composite whole more than they are the traces and coded signals of a fertile career, nowhere finished and still on the search for new groundbreaking paths.

Mohammad Omer Khalil

The artist is one of the distinguished artistic practitioners of the Middle East, having pioneered not only print-making but conceptual drawing and different styles in painting interweaving contemporary ideas with classical techniques and the use of ready-mades and crass-objects. Born in Burri, Sudan, in 1936, Mohammed Omar Khalil studied at the School of Fine and Applied Arts in Khartoum, Sudan, and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. Since 1967, he has lived and worked in New York. His work has been showcased in important venues all over the world, including the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, Kunsthalle Darmstadt in Germany, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, both in New York City.