LAWRENCE WEINER

Salomon Contemporary, East Hampton

Born 10 February 1942 Bronx, New York attended the New York public school system. The late fifties and early sixties were spent traveling thoughout North America (USA, Mexico and Canada).

The first presentation of the work was in Mill Valley, California in 1960. Lawrence Weiner divides his time between his studio in New York City and his boat in Amsterdam.

He participates in public and private projects and exhibitions in both the new and old world maintaining that: 'Art is the emprical fact of the relationships of objects to objects in relation to human beings and not dependent upon historical precedent for either use or legitimacy'.

WIM DELVOYE

Wim Delvoye’s entry in the world of contemporary art in the early 80s did not go unnoticed: painting heraldic emblems on ironing boards and shovels, Delft patterns on gas canisters, and placing stained-glass windows in soccer goalposts, his works became hybrids, playing with the opposition between high and low, between contemporary art and pop culture, combining both craft and concept.

Delvoye’s next gothic piece, Cement Truck is a new commission for Art Dubai 2008

Supported by Albion, London and Art Dubai.

SUNIL GAWDE

Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai

Sunil Gawde’s interest as a sculptor is in choosing everyday objects and presenting them in magnified form as objects for meditation. Not as functional objects, but as foci that prompt the viewer to reflect on the larger conceptual questions that lie buried under the flow of everyday life. Questions of illumination and blindness to insight, movement and stasis, animate his sculptural work. Household appliances gain symbolic meaning. Thus the common light bulb, the shaving razor and the clock pendulum begin to carry the weight of knowledge, danger and the relentless passing of time.

TAREK ZAKI

An EFG Hermes Project presented by The Townhouse Gallery, Cairo

At the core of Tarek Zaki's work is a fascination with time and the opposition of the iconic and the banal.  Positioning himself as a time-travelling archaeologist, he strips back the implications of the present and allows the viewer to be a dispassionate onlooker.

'Monument X' deals with the idea of the monument as a symbol, an iconic emblem of political and historical information. Monuments have been created for thousands of years, and they are often
the most durable and popular symbols of civilizations. They are the bridges that connect the past to the future. In his present work, artist Tarek Zaki penetrates to the core of the monument by rendering new meanings to old symbols, thus the traditional vertical apprehension of a monument is being replaced by a new horizontal perspective. 'Monument X' is a puzzle that only the viewer's imagination can solve and complete.

AMIR H. FALLAH

RHYS Gallery, Boston / Los Angeles

From framed miniatures on paper, to large-scale canvases and murals, Fallah's works lie somewhere between the amorphous painterly blobs of a Philip Guston and the flashy candy coated gloss of computer-generated illustrations. Less clearly derived from graffiti than his previous body of work, Fallah still combines so-called high and low forms of culture to make vibrant art that surpasses such simplistic categorizations.

Fallah is a founder of and has been a creative director for Beautiful Decay, L. A.-based quarterly pop culture & art magazine since 2002.

Marwan Rechmaoui

Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg and Beirut

Marwan Rechmaoui studied Fine Arts (Painting and Sculpture) in the United States. He lives and works in Beirut. He has taken part in many exhibitions and projects, including: Missing Links, Art Practices from Lebanon, Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cairo, 2001; Mediterranean Metaphors II, Contemporary Art from Lebanon, The Borusan Center for Culture and Arts, Istanbul, 2000; Goethe Institut. German Cultural Center, Damascus, 1999; The French Cultural Center, Beirut, 1998; The Casula Power House, Sydney, 1998; The Cairo International Biennial, Egypt - UNESCO Prize, 1998; Château De Serviers, Marseille, 1996

THE FLYING HOUSE

Al Quoz, Dubai, UAE
050 651 9935
arsharif@the-flyinghouse.com
www.the-flyinghouse.com.

Hassan Sharif, Mohammed Ahmad, artists
Mohammed Kazem, curator
Abdul-Raheem Sharif, founder

Art Dubai is delighted to exhibit work from The Flying House, a new space that exposes visitors to contemporary art being produced in the UAE.

In the early 1990s, Abdul-Raheem Sharif began to archive and produce a documentary on the works of his two brothers (Hassan & Hussein Sharif) and other UAE artists.  This archival practice has developed into The Flying House, a creative space where visitors can view artworks, read about the organisation's international and regional exhibitions, and meet the artists and curators.

Mohammed Kazem, a pupil of Hassan Sharif’s and a talented photographer, painter and curator who worked on the 8th Sharjah Biennial, has assisted Abdul-Raheem in creating the Flying House.

Hassan Sharif studied at Bryam Shaw in London in the 1970s; he returned immediately to Dubai and has been producing work in a variety of media ever since. Sharif writes and produces films examining the ways in which Emirati artists relate to contemporary art developments internationally.