Mohammed Kazem Black and White in Dialog

13 October 2022

Mohammed Kazem · Bipolar – Black and White in Dialog

Mohammed Kazem (*1969) is one of the most important representatives of contemporary art - and is celebrated as a shooting star in the United Arab Emirates. His name has been familiar to the international art world at least since his outstanding contribution to the 55th Venice Art Biennale, where the UAE pavilion, which he designed as a multimedia space, thrilled the public.

After his first experiences with painting and performance art, Mohammed Kazem began working on his Scratches group of works in the early 1990s, which already reveals many aspects of his later work. Using scissors, he works on the smooth surface of the hand-made paper and roughens it up.

In this way he creates a relief on what is actually a two-dimensional work of art. This relief, in turn, offers light and shadow a stage on which they play with pleasure and variety. Similar to the Austrian concrete artist Heinz Gappmayr, Kazem always tries to make the abstract (here: light) tangible - albeit with different means.