Ayyam Gallery Al Quoz is pleased to announce 39, the first suggestive retrospective of multidisciplinary artist Faisal Samra. A Bahrain-born Saudi-national, Samra is recognised as a pioneer of conceptual art in the Gulf and a leading contemporary artist in the Middle East. The exhibition will present a comprehensive survey selected by the artist, who will serve as its curator and scenographer, thus offering a rare look into his versatile creative practice. Featuring a variety of media, the exhibition will highlight the many formal investigations that have distinguished his nearly four-decade long career while also underlining his ongoing investigation of the figure through existentialist themes.
Active since 1975, Samra is one of the region’s most experimental artists. Often employing several media in a single artwork, his successive projects have focused on what he describes as ‘finding solutions to a visual problematic,’ what might also be understood as an ongoing breakaway from aesthetic conventions. Samra’s early works, for example, demonstrate his initial interest in surpassing the boundaries of figuration with drawings of subjects that stir despite their stationary positions such as in Quran Reader (1978), which depicts a male protagonist whose body appears to dissolve.
