Ten artists from throughout the Gulf have been nominated for the second Richard Mille Artwork Prize. The complete record might be discovered right here.
Work by the artists is on present at Louvre Abu Dhabi till 19 March and the winner shall be introduced 20 March.
Exhausting cushions and delicate, yielding stone: Shaikha Al Mazrou’s work typically confounds our understanding of supplies and their properties. In her 2021 work The Plinth, 4 columns of Carrara marble are crumpled and drawn along with a yellow bow. Al Mazrou’s largest sculpture but, Crimson Stack, exhibited on the 2022 Frieze Sculpture present in London, is a teetering pile of pink cushions made out of fibreglass. Different works have seen folded paper shapes transmuted into metal.
Dubai-born and based mostly, Al Mazrou did her MFA at Chelsea Faculty of Arts in London and is presently a visiting assistant professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her work is impressed by minimalism and conceptual artwork, and artists resembling Paul Klee, Carl Andre and Wassily Kandinsky. She describes her artwork as “expressions of materiality, the articulations of pressure and the interaction between type and content material.” She typically makes use of mass-produced supplies in her work, resembling digital waste or building supplies, experimenting with these sources to create summary geometric preparations.
Her work for the Richard Mille Artwork Prize, known as A Nonetheless Lifetime of an Ever-changing Crop Subject, is a visible departure from earlier artworks however retains her curiosity in supplies. Discs of various sizes lie on the gallery flooring. Comprised of glazed ceramic, they appear like lozenges or buttons; all are inscribed with round ridges.
Al Mazrou took the kinds from crops planted within the desert, these geometric kinds being an emblem of human intervention, with the arid land made productive by trendy agricultural methods. The exhibition wall textual content explains: “Fascinated by the mapping of the crops’ location, their systematic placement and rotations, the artist questions this hybrid creation of recent engineering. These calculated, round shapes are non-native to the land, positioned in an setting the place they don’t belong, and discover nature’s place in a world invaded by human imprint.”