THE ARMORY SHOW 2022

This runs concurrently with Between Sunrise and Sunset, the artist’s major installation for The National Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates at the 59^th Venice Biennale. The exhibition, on view at Arsenale – Sale d’Armi in Venice until 27 November 2022, is a hall-filling piece comprising 128 abstract and organic elements in his signature medium of papier-mâché.

Ibrahim’s intensely experimental and prolific art practice conveys his deep fascination with memory, imagery and ways of seeing and experiencing the environment , coming from both his personal experiences and the kind of innate memory found in our DNA, which he describes as a ‘primitive urge’. His work resonates his deep connection to the natural environment of Khorfakkan, a rambling coastal town on the Gulf of Oman, enclosed on one side by the rocky Hajar Mountains and the other by the sea. His paintings and drawings are imbued with his own form of language—inscriptions, lines and abstract forms that are reminiscent of ancient scripts—marking time and memory through meditative repetition.

For The Armory Show, Ibrahim recreates his immersive installation, originally presented as part of a group exhibition at the Kunstcentrum Sittard in the Netherlands in 1995—his debut in Europe. Black typographic marks on paper line the walls, from floor to ceiling, filling the entire space. Ibrahim’s fascination with the line traces back to his early childhood memories of markings on the gate walls of homes in his town. Single lines were drawn in charcoal to indicate the number of water bottles delivered. Leaving an imprint on his memory, these repeated lines—some reminiscent of ancient scripts, road marks or city skylines—have become the backbone of Ibrahim’s practice.

Against the monochromatic backdrop of lines, a series of black and white papier-mâché wall sculptures create the sensation of the marks materialising three-dimensionally from the walls. Part painting, part sculpture, Ibrahim’s sculptural experimentations have a primordial quality to them—a grouping of hand-moulded oblong shapes wedged with blocks of card, bodies of paper hanging from strings or crushed into the shapes. Similarly, in his collages and assemblages, cut out paper and card are arranged to create various compositions of the same repetitive black lines. At times minimal, at times complex, the works play with notions of multiplicity and division.

In parallel to these, Ibrahim presents four recent paintings, a continuation of his Symbols body of work. Large-scale, bright, and textured, his canvases are populated with his emblematic abstract notations—an innate, instinctive script, meditatively repeated in an obsessive yet gentle manner, reconfigured and recoloured, much as the vertical marks in his Lines works.

Lastly, the presentation is centred by an arrangement of vibrant papier-mâché sculptures. Some are anthropomorphic and dynamic—others emerge as organic plant-like forms, and some toy-like. The brightly coloured sculptures are crafted from natural paper pigments combined by the artist, their vivid repeated lines of colour consistent with the obsessive mark-making of his practice, whilst the shapes reflect the natural formations of his domestic landscape. His choice of saturated and at times garish colour combinations seek to capture the ‘explosion in his eyes’ he experienced when he first saw the sunset—until that moment a life lived beneath the Hajar Mountains had obstructed its view.

Press release courtesy Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai.