• This exhibition brings together a rare group of early works on paper by Mohammed Kazem, dating from the 1990s, a formative period in the career of an artist whose practice has contributed significantly to the development of contemporary art in the United Arab Emirates. Produced at a moment of intense experimentation, these works reveal the emergence of concerns that continue to resonate throughout Kazem’s oeuvre: observation, repetition, materiality, and an enduring fascination with the traces through which we experience the world.
  • “The meaning or purpose of his paintings lies in the life of the colours and the ways they can be put to use, not in the painted objects themselves.” - Hassan Sharif on Mohammed Kazem.

    Kazem’s artistic journey was profoundly shaped by his encounter with Hassan Sharif, the pioneering conceptual artist who became his mentor after the young Kazem left school at the age of fourteen. 

     

    This formative relationship encouraged him to look beyond representation and toward a practice grounded in process, perception, and the possibilities of ordinary materials.

  • The three Landscape (1999) works painted in Hatha included in this exhibition reflect this early engagement with observation and atmosphere....
    The three Landscape (1999) works painted in Hatha included in this exhibition reflect this early engagement with observation and atmosphere. Rather than depicting a landscape as a fixed image, Kazem explored the sensory and emotional qualities of colour, light, and rhythm, seeking to translate experience rather than representation.

  • Created in Al Qusais, where Kazem and Sharif shared a studio within the Youth Club, the exhibition includes four collages of tiny works on paper arranged like a scroll and entitled Scene No. 1, 2, 3 and 4 (1993); marking some of the artist’s earliest explorations of the technique that would later become known as his Scratches. Working directly into the surface of the paper through repeated incisions, Kazem transformed drawing into an act of accumulation and duration. Delicate yet rigorous, these compositions hover between image and object, surface and relief, revealing an artist increasingly interested in the material presence of the work itself.

     

    Viewed together, the Landscape (1999) and Scene (1993 and 1998) works reveal an artist already attentive to the relationship between perception and place, gesture and duration, material and meaning.