Aside from representation itself – landscape, portrait, still life, and so forth – geometrical figures have long been favored by artists. Geometrical abstraction has seeped into such European art movements as minimalism and cubism, giving way to a studied use of materials and space on the canvas. People from the West didn’t discover this, of course. Along with floral motifs, geometrical designs have long been employed in various forms of Islamic art, from painting or architecture, the best-known form probably being the arabesque.
Syrian artist Mouteea Murad has revisited the Islamic cubistic art in his exhibition of abstract paintings Through the Looking Glass II. Murad’s first solo exhibition in Beirut is comprised of seven acrylic-on-canvas works, all “juxtaposing order and chaos,” as gallery press notes put it, of geometric abstraction.
In the early years of his career, Murad’s early painting was preoccupied with dark personalities, but he later felt the urge to reorient his work to an exploration of color. Embracing the art history of this region, Murad takes his audience on an exploration of colorful spaces composed of stripes, squares and perspective, entirely living up to the kaleidoscopic promise of the show’s nod to Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll’s 1871 sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
