Meet me here

Meet Me Here
Rebwar Saed & Hoshyar Rasheed
8 Apr – 13 Jun 2021

Hama Gallery is proud to present Meet Me Here, our opening exhibition featuring the work of brothers Rebwar Saed and Hoshyar Rasheed. Meet Me Here contains paintings and sculptures by each artist as well as their latest collaboration in 2020 – 2021, REBYAR.

Rebwar Saed

For these diptychs, Rebwar Saed has used acrylic paint with such a light hand that it recalls the soft shading of watercolour. He depicts figures folding into each other in romantic embraces or on their own, with their faces lifted, arms reaching to hug the sky. The figures are thickly outlined in black, contrasting with the dreamy pastels of the background.

The series inspires a sense of intimacy as Rebwar’s subjects caress each other’s faces, their cubistic profiles at once gazing into each other’s eyes and directly looking at the viewer. In most, the couples are alone together in their own universe. In other works, abstract landscapes allude to a surrounding world with its own histories, as in Diary #3, where the layers of the earth on which the woman stands have their own hands and faces.

Rebwar Saed translates his imagery onto narrow slats of curved wood for the series Colours on Gray Time. The title refers to their creation during the colorless quarantine days of COVID-19, the work symbolizes the colors that will return after the pandemic. On every slat he depicts a scene containing his trademark abstract portraits with reaching hands and fauna, blooming in his vivid colour and black delineation.

Rebwar has gotten the most out of his materials by recycling the sawdust and mixing this with wood glue and acrylic paint to create the brightly coloured textures throughout the work. The series can be shuffled into different combinations of three slats or more so that you are invited to collaborate with the artist in the storytelling process.

Hoshyar Rasheed

Planes of colour form wide open spaces in these dreamworlds by Hoshyar Rasheed. The artist fills them with fantastical sketches: humanlike bipedals huddle together, fish swim freely across the canvas, and faces with more than two eyes can be interpreted as both portraits and profiles.

For the richly saturated surfaces, Rasheed applies layer upon layer of paint until the right colour and depth emerge. This texture on the canvas adds to the whimsicality of the work. Every spot of paint on the block of colour belongs in the environment and Hoshyar has given each of them a place and their own shadow. They weren’t dropped onto the painting, rather they float around in it as living elements.

Hoshyar Rasheed expresses his fantastical style in three dimensions with these MDF-board sculptures, one in monochrome, the other in splashes of primary colour. These sculptures show Hoshyar’s enthusiasm for the endless artistic imagination: there is so much to look at.

Both the form and the adornment of these sculptures celebrate the daydream. The pen lines twist and turn into figurative elements: fish, faces, the wheels of make-believe machines.

REBYAR

In REBYAR – a fusion of their names – the brothers’ divergent styles meet despite the distance between them. The project is a COVID-era collaboration, made in 2020 and 2021. Rebwar sent sketches from Kurdistan to the Netherlands, where Hoshyar completed them: “if he has sketched rain, you need clouds.”

The brothers meet on canvas in a diptych in the style of Rebwar’s Diary series. For this, Hoshyar has complemented a set of Rebwar’s embraces with a mosaic backdrop –tiles in multicolour, each with their own figure. On the lefthand panel, the family resemblance is at its strongest when the brothers’ styles literally weave into each other. At first glance, the viewer recognizes Rebwar’s subjects, a closer look at the fish in profile and the finer lines reveal Hoshyar’s hand.

REBYAR consists in part of a series of ceramics, for which Hoshyar has transferred the finished sketches onto porcelain objects, such as apples and vases of his own design. The organic shape of the fruit and the freehand curvature and black contouring of the vase reflect their decoration.

The distinct styles of each artist are immediately recognizable in the series. Rebwar’s geometric figures in graphic black wander alone or embrace each other among Hoshyar’s twirling cords, swirling clouds and flying fish.