He is now recognised as a pioneer of contemporary Emirati art, with works in major institutional collections such as the Guggenheim Foundation, but Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim didn’t always feel like his art had a place in the world. In fact, in the late 1990s, he was in the throes of an artistic crisis so severe that he set fire to two truck-loads of his own artwork.
“Every person sometimes reaches this place, this Bermuda Triangle within,” he says. “It is a zone of disintegration, a loss of awareness. I reached that stage in 1999. I had a lot of works, almost everything from the beginning up to that time. They were in two trucks. I didn’t know where to put them, I didn’t have place to put them.”
Ibrahim took the artworks to the mountains of Khor Fakkan, where he piled them into a colourful heap and set them ablaze. Paintings, works on paper and sculptural forms withered in the fire and turned to ash. “Dust to dust,” Ibrahim says. “The works came from those mountains and they returned to the mountains.”
Now 63 years old, the artist recognises that he acted out of psychological strain, a feeling that local audiences weren’t able to “read” his art.
The episode may have almost severed him from his practice, but instead, it marked a turning point. The day after, Ibrahim was creating art again and with unprecedented clarity.
“The moment changed me,” he says. “My works were already provocative before that – not because they themselves were provocative, but because society was unable read them. But after that, I started considering their nature as an aspect of the work. They became deliberately provocative.”
Despite the societal disconnect, Ibrahim was not alone. He was surrounded by a group of like-minded artists, each of whom would contribute to the development of contemporary Emirati art.
Up until the mid-1980s, Ibrahim had learnt to nurture his passion for art in isolation, fuelled by the books that his brother-in-law would send him from the UK.
“Books about art and art history and biographies in English,” Ibrahim explains. That, coupled with his studies at Al Ain University in psychology – a field he had selected as there was nothing dedicated to the arts – taught him to see “the discourse behind the image, behind what is seen”.
“I was practising with the few tools I had, and I was practising according to my own understanding and reading,” he says. “I looked at what was happening in the world at that time, especially in books – the American modernists, for example, or the abstract expressionist movement – that opened doors to the experimentation.”
Ibrahim emerged from his solitary practice in 1986, when he met the late Hassan Sharif, an artist and founding member of the influential Emirates Fine Arts Society. The meeting would become a landmark moment for the local arts scene, ushering in a new chapter.
“Honestly, we helped each other a lot,” Ibrahim says. “Then Hussein Sharif joined us, then Abdullah Al Saadi and later Mohammed Kazem, who was younger than us. From our discussions with each other, from our presentations, from our shared interests of music, poetry and literature, a friendship and artistic bond grew between us.
“The friendship between me and Hassan, and the presence of friends who shared that kind of thinking or visual outlook, led to an open circle of discussion. You couldn’t have such conversations except with those few people, maybe just the five of us, because outside that circle, people didn’t understand what we were talking about.”
These five artists would eventually be regarded as formative figures of contemporary Emirati art. They became informally known as “The Five” because of their participation in a 2002 exhibition, titled 5 UAE, in Germany. Though they worked in different mediums, they bolstered the country’s art scene and influenced a generation of artists in the region.
Their practices have garnered more international attention in recent years. Most of The Five have, in fact, shown works at the Venice Biennale through the National Pavilion UAE. Ibrahim himself was featured in a 2022 solo exhibition titled Between Sunrise and Sunset.
The title piece was an installation that took two years to produce. It comprised 128 sculptural forms, each unique in shape, size and colour. The work was devised using organic materials. Ibrahim formed the papier mâché over skeletal frames before using earth, leaves and even coffee and tobacco to add texture to them.
The sculptures were arranged in a gradient, ranging from more vivid hues to the dulled and monochrome palettes that alluded to the night. Some were as tall as a human being.
Others were minuscule, barely rising to ankle-height. Some had anthropomorphic qualities – with a limb here or a head there, whereas others suggested the shapes of trees. The installation marked a homecoming earlier this year and was displayed at Sharjah’s Maraya Arts Centre.
However, while that work presented a certain facet of Ibrahim’s work, an ongoing solo show at the Cultural Foundation Abu Dhabi offers a more comprehensive look at his output. Titled Two Clouds in the Night Sky, the exhibition also features a 1989 painting by the artist – a rarity considering his bonfire a decade later.
Two Clouds in the Night Sky brings together works from various mediums. Ibrahim’s totemic sculptures are huddled in the central space. Paintings patterned by forms inspired by the natural environment of his native Khor Fakkan are hung around the sculptures.
A commissioned piece, Time/Place/Void, is presented in the central space as well – an architectural intervention with four colourful interconnected rooms inscribed with Ibrahim’s signature line drawings.
There is also a space dedicated to his famous Sitting Man paintings, inspired by an accidental photograph Ibrahim took of Hassan Sharif that captured the artist without his head. The final stretch of the exhibition shows some of Ibrahim’s archival material and gives visitors the chance to engage with his pieces through touch – a work developed after conversations with the exhibition’s curator Noor AlMehairbi.
The works come together in the exhibition as a surreal forest of sorts – or a “garden” as Ibrahim calls it – complete with its own ecosystem of trees, insects and lifeforms crafted from papier mâché and water bottles. Children, Ibrahim says, seem to engage with his works the most. It isn’t surprising, considering his vibrant palette and the shapes that goad the imagination to interpret anything from clouds to UFOs, people to chairs, towers of barnacles to imaginary beings.
“I see it as a garden,” Ibrahim says. “I enjoyed it. I enjoyed seeing the works there. As an artist, you only see your works in the studio. But to see them on the walls of the space prompts a dialogue between yourself and your works. This kind of exhibition confirms your relationship with yourself; it confirms your conviction. I don’t need to be encouraged, but it instils a certainty. That certainty is encouraging because, in the end, you are a person who carries within you the genes and the cells of your society, its culture, its language, its vision and all that.”
Khor Fakkan is the city that Ibrahim most potently carries in his genes and in his art. Its geography and extraordinary colour palette has been a prime inspiration since his secluded beginnings in art.
The city’s corals and cliffs are featured in his art as allusions or artistic materials. Their patterns and textures appear in his paintings. In sculptures such as Fresh and Salt, they are used as a medium in themselves.
The splendour of Khor Fakkan – as well as the conversations Ibrahim had with his peers – fuelled his practice for decades. He persevered in creating art as he moved from job to job across the years.
“I began in the police, then at the public library then the Khorfakkan Art Centre, then Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, after that Umm Al Quwain National Bank, then Emirates Services Corporation, and the last stop was Khor Fakkan Hospital,” he says. “Each stage was a story.”
Sometimes he’d create art while on the job, hiding the works he created in his office drawer. “I tried to create something I called the Drawer Studio,” Ibrahim says. “It was literally a studio in a drawer, materials I could use alone, away from the eyes of others. I saw it as a private ritual, something I did secretly. When someone enters, you close the drawer and nothing appears.”
Ibrahim has since retired from traditional employment and has become a full-time artist. Travelling has become a major part of his recent practice, and he has come to glean inspiration from cities across the world.
“There are many places that attract me,” he says. “Sittard in the Netherlands, Dijon in France, Port Kochi in India, Kathmandu in Nepal. Each place forms a friendship.”
But one that he returns to at least twice a year is Cairo. He stays with his brother-in-law on Al Shesheini, a street he finds particularly engaging for its colourful shopfronts and façades.
He has even produced a series of paintings inspired by the street. “It is very beautiful,” he says. “The buildings blend with the street. The sky blends with the ground. The human behaviour is blended. Imagine a vegetable seller next to another seller spreading his goods on the ground in a colour-coded manner. It’s surreal. It becomes like a kind of folk relief.”
Travelling has expanded his artistic horizons, but Ibrahim still considers the UAE and its arts scene as his primary spring of inspiration. During conversations with the rest of The Five in the 1980s and 1990s, Ibrahim says they often laid their hopes on the next generation. All these years later, that trust has been vindicated. A new wave of Emirati artists has emerged, carrying forward the experimental spirit The Five had once envisioned.
“I’m very happy when I see the young artists working seriously and passionately,” Ibrahim says. “We also have institutional support now, private and public, museums and universities. It just needed time. I am extremely happy with this young generation. They’re my friends, all of them. They are all dear to me.”
He is looking to further empower the next generation of artists from the UAE. “I want to make a foundation. It will have a private studio for me, as well as a place to host young artists if they want to work with me.”
TN Magazine editor: Nasri Atallah
TN Magazine deputy editor and fashion director: Sarah Maisey
Photographer: Hussein Mardini
Assistant photographer: Mohamed Maged
Shot on location: Al Shesheini, Cairo, Egypt
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