Construction of Light and Shadow

The exhibition Construction of Light and Shadow, featuring works by the internationally renowned Bahrain-based artist Rashid Al Khalifa, will open at Galerie Hotel Mond Fine Arts on 1 April 2022 at 6:00 pm. The exhibition will run from 2 April to 1 May 2022.

Rashid Al Khalifa’s primary theme is light. From an early stage, his efforts have been directed towards depicting his perception and experience of light. Making light visually tangible is a seminal factor leading to the works on view at Galerie Hotel Mond Fine Arts in Berlin. At the beginning of his artistic career, he dealt with landscapes, with the different light conditions prevailing there, with the desert landscapes of his homeland Bahrain, and with the very different landscapes of England, where he went to study art in 1972. The great English landscape painters of the first half of the nineteenth century, such as John Constable and William Turner, provided the impetus for his first encounter with these landscapes. In this context, colours increasingly played a role, while he broke away from his naturalistic painting style in favour of abstract colour compositions. At the same time, he experimented with different materials, mounting them on canvases in an attempt to leave two-dimensionality behind. His works increasingly shifted from the surface into three-dimensionality. They bulge out from the wall, grow into the space. In the process, Rashid Al Khalifa discovered the convex form for himself, which, from this point on, became decisive for his work.

From then on, he became interested in materials other than canvas and paint. He began to work with steel and aluminium, the surfaces of which were better suited to realising his vision of light. To do this, he works on the surfaces in their entirety, gives them structure, covers them with a complex, filigree network of lines. By inserting small aluminium plates of various sizes into this network of horizontals and verticals, he creates a three-dimensionality, thus transforming the work into a vibrating medium of light and space. A further element in many of the works is the colour with which the surfaces are covered, in some cases with great subtlety, which only becomes apparent on closer inspection.

The influences of Islamic architecture are unmistakable – as are the principles of geometry underlying the oriental ornaments, the arabesques, and the Arabic numerical systems, the application of which can often be found in calligraphy. In their design, the surfaces of his objects are also reminiscent of the principle of oriental carpet weaving or the mashrabiyas, the ornamented windows made of carved or turned wood arranged in geometric patterns that we generally associate with the Orient. They filter the sunlight, provide coolness, and create sophisticated light patterns in the interior spaces. You cannot see from the outside in, but indeed from the inside out. The visible pattern consists of individual, differently patterned surfaces which, when placed on top of each other, create the overall pattern. There is a play with the visible and the hidden. In the three-dimensionality, the patterned layers, superimposed and interlocked, create areas of light and shadow.

His free-hanging objects (the Mobile Columns), as well as his free-standing objects, such as the one on view in the exhibition, strive for a directly perceptible play of light and shadow. They are carefully crafted, multi-layered constructs based on precise numbers that achieves the desired goal: a complex play of light and shadow.

Despite his knowledge of contemporary formal artistic languages, Rashid Al Khalifa always sees himself embedded in the tradition of his origins and draws on these influences and impressions.

The exhibition was curated by Karin Adrian von Roques, a freelance curator specialising in Middle Eastern art.

After the show in Berlin, the exhibition will travel on in expanded form to the Rosenhang Museum in Weilburg an der Lahn. It will open there on 15 May 2022 and run until 7 August 2022.

About the Artist

Rashid Al Khalifa, a member of the royal family, was born in 1952 in the Kingdom of Bahrain. He began painting at a young age. He had his first exhibition at the age of sixteen at the Dilmun Hotel in Bahrain. Encouraged by this, he went to England in 1972, where he studied art at Hastings College of Arts and Technology in Sussex. He returned to Bahrain in 1978. Since then, he has worked continuously on his artistic career. He is now considered one of Bahrain’s most important artists and has made a name for himself internationally.

Rashid Al Khalifa has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in galleries, public and private institutions, and museums such as the National Museum of Bahrain, the Ayyam Gallery in Dubai, the Bait Muzna Gallery in Oman, and the Saatchi Gallery in London. He has also participated in biennials such as the Venice Biennale and the TRIO Biennale in Rio de Janeiro. Numerous works are in important public and private collections.

From November to 2019 to January 2020, his work was on view at the me Collectors Room Berlin in the highly acclaimed exhibition Transverse Wave, curated by Karin Adrian von Roques and Hauke Ohls.

It was on this occasion that Rashid Al Khalifa and Galerie Hotel Mond Fine Arts met. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, a solo exhibition scheduled at the gallery for 2020, which was then to travel on to the Rosenhang Museum in Weilburg and from there to the Kunstforum Wien in Vienna, had to be postponed.

In October 2021, however, the gallery was able to present a highly successful collaboration with the artist at the art fair Contemporary Istanbul. The stand featured a solo exhibition curated by Karin Adrian von Roques.

About the Curator

Karin Adrian von Roques is an internationally renowned German curator and art historian who studied painting and stage/costume design, at the Academy of the Arts in Berlin and later Islamic art history at the University in Bonn. At an early stage, she specialised in contemporary Arab and Iranian art. She has curated numerous exhibitions for various galleries, museums, and cultural institutions in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, Korea, and the United States, among others. She was the lead curator of the FotoFest Biennial View from Inside – Contemporary Arab Photography, Video and Mixed Media in Houston, Texas in 2014 and in Abu Dhabi in 2015. In 2019/20, she curated the highly acclaimed exhibition Transverse Wave at the me Collectors Room Berlin, featuring works by the German artist Mary Bauermeister, the Bahraini artist Rashid Al Khalifa, and the German composer Simon Stockhausen. In the summer of 2021, she curated the exhibition Raum für alle hat die Erde (There Is a Place for Everyone on Earth) with works by the Iraqi-born artist Hassan Massoudy for a project of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. She worked as a consultant for Sotheby’s and advised Deutsche Bank on the acquisition of contemporary Arab art. She lectures and regularly writes articles for art magazines. She has a great interest in world cultures and in mediating between cultures. She is particularly interested in contributing to a better understanding of the Islamic world.

About the Gallery

Galerie Hotel Mond Fine Arts was established in 2019 with an innovative exhibition concept. One of the gallery’s goals is to break through entrenched structures in art presentation and to make art experienceable in a new way with unusual exhibition concepts. The aim is to visualise the classic gallery business as a concept store. The name is derived from the history of the building in which the gallery is located.

The original building at Mommsenstr. 17 on the corner of Bleibtreustr. in Berlin-Charlottenburg, with its turrets, bay windows, and a thousand details worth seeing, was built more than a hundred years ago and was not destroyed during the Second World War. It stands immediately adjacent to house no. 15, where the legendary art dealer, publisher, and patron Alfred Flechtheim lived from 1923 to 1933. According to recently found documents of a building application with intended use from 1920, a boarding house was to be built at this corner under the name ‘Hotel Mond’, with eight rooms on the first and second floors and the ground floor to be used as a reception with lounge. The applicant for the building permit was a certain Menachem Mond, from whom the name of the planned hotel was derived.

The current exhibition, Rashid Al Khalifa: Construction of Light and Shadow, is the prelude to a gallery project in which internationally renowned artists from Arab countries and Iran will be regularly presented in the context of and in dialogue with European artists. The project is supervised by the gallerist Frieda Vogel and the specialist for art from the MENA region Karin Adrian von Roques.