Playful exhibitors take a chance on boldness

Ed Lake

• Last Updated: November 21. 2009 4:35PM UAE / November 21. 2009 12:35PM GMT

Roy Lichtenstein’s Half Face With Collar is part of the Gagosian Gallery’s contribution to Abu Dhabi Art at the Emirates Palace. Jaime Puebla / The National

Jeff Koons assured his audience at Thursday night’s party for the Abu Dhabi Art fair that, no matter how alien or calculated his style of pop art might seem, “it’s all just metaphors for people”. Interesting that he felt this should be said.

The fair itself, staged collectively and without mutual consultation by 50 of the world’s leading commercial galleries, presents the Emirates Palace with a vision of art that is certainly more poppy, playful and unsettling than Abu Dhabi’s previous experiments in this line. Dealers at Middle Eastern art fairs often err on the meek and decorative side – think of all those Miro-like, latter-day Expressionist canvases at ArtParis Abu Dhabi last year.

This time around, taste-makers such as the Gagosian Gallery and White Cube decided to chance some of the more outré items in their arsenals.

The Gagosian booth, in fact, was dominated by one of Koons’s own pieces: Diamond (Red), a giant polished steel and chrome sculpture of a bright red jewel in gold setting, as garish and pointedly hollow a work as one would expect from this proud idolater of kitsch.

Mesmerising as it is, it was not the Gagosian’s most inviting adventure in vacuity, however. That distinction goes to Takeshi Murakami’s painting My arms and legs rot off..., an impossibly slick acrylic painting of a boss-eyed ogre in black, blue and neon. Murakami is better known for his work at the super-cutesy, Hello Kitty end of otaku fantasy. This piece has the rough line and racy composition of a Japanese woodblock print: it injects a fascinatingly dissonant note of traditionalism into a body of work that typically invites the viewer off into Marioland, yet it sacrifices none of Murakami’s trademark tartrazine kick. Meanwhile Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont offered a sibling to Murakami’s psychotic sweetness in the sculptor David Mach. His conspicuously nude King Kong made of coathangers (Silver Streak) and a befanged, exultant teddy bear (title unprintable in a family publication) both do media whimsy with a side-order of sardonic nastiness: bracing and bilious where Koons is detached.

One of the fugitive pleasures of any art fair is trying to interpret its trends, those embarrassments and redundancies when two galleries come to the ball in the same dress. For instance, what calculation might have led Galerie Enrico Navarra, Lio Malca, Tony Shafrazi and a handful of other exhibitors to bet so heavily on Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring this year? Is it the commercial invulnerability of Warhol (also well represented across the fair) that has persuaded dealers, in these straitened times, to take a punt on his barefoot New York heirs?

Or take Marc Quinn, best known for provocations such as a self-portrait bust made of frozen blood and Alison Lapper Pregnant, a statue of a disabled woman on display in Trafalgar Square. Why, then, are his lush but anodyne paintings of flowers and irises waiting to spring at you from every turn? What makes now the moment for Bharti Kher’s bindi collages, entrancing as they are? Through a careful consideration of such confluences, one might assemble a picture of the hopes and fears of the times.

But an art fair is no place for carefully considering anything, when the next brilliant diversion is always clamouring for attention. And it’s gratifying to note that the next brilliant diversions could be artists we already know well in the UAE: Dubai regulars such as Ramin Haerizadeh, Khosrow Hassanzadeh and Yousef Nabil all found prominent places in European gallery booths.

Especially noteworthy was Halim al Karim’s From the King’s Harem series at the Galerie Patrice Trigano stand. Karim is a recurring presence at XVA (he has a new show there now). He specialises in a sort of out-of-focus figure photography in which one or two details, often the eyes, are caught with exaggerated crispness.

In the series here the elaborate dresses of Karim’s odalisques are obscured by the whirling movement of his camera. Is their finery more fine, it seems to ask, and their oriental splendour more splendid for barely being visible? Do the figures even need to be there at all?

Koons would say it’s all just metaphors for people. Yet sometimes, as Karim shows us, the people are hiding in plain view and sometimes the view is not so plain in any case. Compared with the ironic inhumanity of the pop stuff, this work is about people in a very direct way, and is all the more refreshing for it.

At the first edition of Abu Dhabi Art there has been space for both visions. As the capital presses on towards its bright cultural destiny, it will be interesting to see if either of them wins out.