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Artist Exhibitions:
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2008 "Private Nightmares"
Redgate Gallery, London
2008 "Constructed Mythologies"
Whitewall, Milton Keynes
Contemporary.
2006 "Men and Insects" solo
mural project. Rich & Famous
Gallery, London.
2006 Solo exhibition, De
Montfort Hall, Leicester.
2005 "Nazir Tanbouli" Solo
exhibition, Factory-Berlin,
Berlin.
2005 “3 Films by Nazir
Tanbouli” The Collection, ...
Further Information
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Artist Galleries:
Coming Soon!
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Artist Reviews:
Coming Soon!
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Collections:
Coming Soon!
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Artist Statement for Nazir Tanbouli
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Nazir Tanbouli is an artist whose approach to his art is like that of a scientist confronting the wonders of the natural world: amazed at its wonder and variety, but approaching it with rigour and method as well as extraordinary passion.
Tanbouli’s chosen medium is drawing, and whatever he produces – drawing, printmaking, painting, installation and video – is all about drawing, all about line and structure and expressing complex ideas through a simple method. Or so it seems, for in fact Tanbouli’s work is anything but simple.
Tanbouli’s body of work to date confounds all sorts of critics: traditionalists who applaud his concentration on drawing and composition, and “conceptualists” who are astonished by his sheer technical brilliance. The artist has managed to marry a highly conceptual approach to a rigorously refined and dedicated process. His approach to drawing is that of a vocation, a continuing search for perfection in line. Not since Ingres has there been an artist so dedicated to the line above all. His line goes exactly where it needs to go, from strictly observational to deeply grotesque - without his pen leaving the surface.
Like Ingres, Tanbouli’s approach is generated from the womb of the Classical rather than the Romantic – not so surprising when you know the artist grew up among the faded splendour of Alexandria. A city full of Hellenic art and artefacts, not to mention its many derivatives; the Classical strictures reinforced by the severity of his Soviet-trained professors. But unlike the classicism of Ingres, Tanbouli’s classicism rebels on the past – it is in the present, insistent; it has mutated into something totally new. Traces of the Hellenes are here, so are Leonardo, Matisse and all the best comic books. So the classicism of the line meets the high drama, even melodrama, of the Romantic, which Tanbouli expresses with powerful light and shade.
When Tanbouli takes his line to a giant surface, all hell breaks loose. His masters, who set the standards, are the big guns – Rivera and Orozco – who dares to do that now? But after appraising their monumentality, Tanbouli strips his down – he draws rather than paints, he keeps things monochrome until he needs colour, and then he astonishes you with it.
Whether his work is figurative or landscape, Tanbouli’s subjects are things we need to think about and talk about. Within all his work – landscape, portrait, self-portrait - is cultural critique. His art work is a quest, a serious and scientific quest, to understand the world and its problems. Problems like emigration, street culture, family, religion. He wants to break down the myths and icons, subvert them, remake them.
Tanbouli’s autobiography demonstrates his own personal dedication to the breaking down of icons. After winning Egypt’s equivalent of the Turner Prize, he was not content to repeat himself, or to ape international fashion. He went to live alone in the desert, in the great Egyptian hermetic tradition. As audience we can see clearly that his work , which I described as scientific, also has a spiritual dimension. The line is a prayer, a mediation, it creates and is created by, a kind of “zen state.” The result is work which manages to be excoriatingly honest, deeply moving and extraordinarily beautiful.
© Gillian McIver 2006
GILLIAN MCIVER IS A CURATOR, WRITER AND ARTIST // WWW.LUNANERA.ORG WWW.ARTSITE.ORG.UK
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