Exposition Art Blog: Hassan Sharif - Conceptual Art

Hassan Sharif - Conceptual Art


Hassan Sharif (1 January 1951 – 18 September 2016) was an Emirati artist who lived and worked in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. His work is represented in major public collections, such as the Guggenheim New York, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Centre Pompidou, Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and Sharjah Art Foundation.
From the early ‘80s, Sharif began creating assemblages from cheap, mass-produced materials or items sourced from the UAE’s markets. With these heaps – often large in scale – Sharif was handing back as artwork the surplus of a recently and rapidly-industrialised UAE. Similarly, "as illustrations of meaningless [sic], taking Duchampian philosophy to heart, they were crafted from commonplace materials, cut, bound or tied together with rope or wire, and thus stripped of their original function." His subsequent assemblages have incorporated coir, rope, copper wire, readymade domestic products, a crutch, newspapers dipped in glue and papier-mache.The process of bundling these objects together – ‘weaving’, as Sharif calls it – has had extraordinary influence on his broader practice, both in the repetitive gesture of tying to the rudimentary handmade nature of the process. "It’s important for me that art is easy, and technically anyone can do it. In that sense, my work is skill-less. I mean, you don't need special skills to make work that becomes art. I don't want the sculptures to appear to result from virtuosity. I'm not trying to make magic of some kind that would impress an audience as to how the work is created. There are no secrets.""Despite the fact that my works are based on a sequential, industrial mode of creativity, they also demolish the sequential autonomy of an industrial product. I inject my works with a realism that exposes this socio-political economic monster, allowing people a chance to recognise the danger of over indulgence in this form of negative consumption."Wikipedia 

















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