Aisha Alabbar Gallery has opened the largest exhibition of Mohammed Al Mazrouei to date until May 29, 2022 — a long-overdue examination of the important Egyptian-Emirati painter’s work.
Al Mazrouei’s artworks revolve around one subject in particular: the female form, which he sculpts in serene, animalistic poses or paints in jagged, expressive brushstrokes. Animals appear too, as do figures from folk tales the Cairo-born artist heard as a child.
Across all these works, large, expressive eyes are the focal point. Still and carefully worked over, they are the constants amid the restlessness of his canvasses.
The works’ almost primal level of angst — his exhibition is baldly titled “No” — can be traced back to the traumatic loss of his mother at a young age. Al Mazrouei explains that the event informs what he calls his “visual dictionary” of repeated symbols such as the X and his numerous depictions of the female form.
Figures from folk tales are also nodded to a more time-honored method of approaching the bends in life’s path.
“Folk tales and myths were popular where I grew up and sometimes I mirror that objectively as a way of explaining a mystery in dreams, spirits, animals, and creatures,” Al Mazrouei says. “The result remains a mystery, like creating a world you do not understand.”
Al Mazrouei was born in Tanta, Egypt, in 1962 and became involved with the intellectual circles in the small university town. He moved to the UAE in 1986 and played a crucial role in the early days of the Cultural Foundation, where he worked in the Culture and Arts Department. Perhaps more importantly, he participated in the amorphous, social aspect of the foundation, in which ideas around painting, poetry, film, and other art forms freely mixed. For example, Al Mazrouei wrote poetry and directed films alongside his painting practice.
He later returned to Cairo and has lived there since, but has recently re-emerged in the UAE as an elder statesman figure. The collective BAIT15 took up residence in his house in central Abu Dhabi and included in their inaugural show his first-ever video. In 2018, he and artist Hashel Al Lamki — who occupied Al Mazrouei’s studio as part of BAIT15 — collaborated on a series of works, shown in the Project Space of the NYUAD Art Gallery.
Al Mazrouei has recently signed with Aisha Alabbar Gallery, a relative newcomer in Dubai, and the gallery has taken over the hefty task of cataloging his work. It is currently found in major UAE collections, such as that of the Department of Culture and Tourism — Abu Dhabi, the Barjeel Art Foundation, and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, but its significance and more broadly the role of the early Cultural Foundation is only beginning to be explored.