Green Art Gallery in Dubai is holding an exhibition dedicated to the art of Lebanese-born artist Chaouki Choukini. The show titled Drawings features his exquisite watercolour artworks and will be open to the public until February 18, 2023.
Inspired by childhood readings of pre-Islamic poetry and his stay in Jordan, Choukini paints desert landscapes bathed in light and characterised by dreamy colors. In his paintings, blurry shapes of desert cityscapes are seen through the haze drawing on music, memories of places, remote villages, and the desert itself. On canvas, elusive visions of cities slowly reveal themselves to the viewer through layers of sand storms and clouds. They are mirages, places which exist within the artist’s memory – part constructivist patchwork, part living being, part dream.
About the artist
Chaouki Choukini (born in 1946, Choukine, a village in Lebanon) is a contemporary artist and sculptor who resides in Paris. In 1972, he graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Artsin in Paris; later the artist taught sculpture at the Lebanese University in Tripoli (1985-1987) and the Jordanian University of Yarmouk (1989-1991). Eventually he settled in Paris.
Choukini is best known for his wooden and sometimes marble or stone sculptures that blur the lines between abstraction and representation and evoke places, events, and characters. His early artworks were mostly horizontal and depicted landscapes from his village, but later he began creating vertical sculptures with a more contemporary feel. After having spent a year in Japan in 1984, Choukini was influenced by Zen philosophy and minimalism. He started to remove parts of his sculptures by puncturing them to incorporate light and air into them.
Choukini received the Prix de la Jeune Sculpture in 1978 and the Taylor Foundation Prize in 2010. Choukini was also awarded the Prix de la Fondation Pierre Gianadda from de l’Academie des Beaux Arts, France, in 2015.
The artist has taken part in numerous solo and group shows which include The Rain Forever Will Be Made of Bullets, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2021); Choukini: 10 Recent Sculptures, Espace Claude Lemand, Paris, France (2020); Chaouki Choukini, Green Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2019); Le monde arabe vu par ses artistes, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France (2018); and many others. The artist’s works have been featured in some important collections such as Amman’s National Gallery of Fine Arts; Sharjah’s Barjeel Art Foundation; Paris’ Centre National des Arts Plastiques, to name a few.
To learn more about the Drawings exhibition, please visit its official web page.
You might also be interested in visiting Sharjah Biennial 15.
