BIO

“The visual language is the language of a creator. In order to understand this language, the person facing it must first perceive himself.”
Abdulhamid Abdalla, 2020

In his paintings, Abdulhamid Abdalla breaks through the classical and abstract Western forms of art and transforms them into a new form of representation in order to focus on current tensioned social, cultural and sexual taboos. Classical portraits merge with the present multimedia image culture, through which he aims to convey direct feelings to the viewer. He reveals the conceptual basis of cultural and personal identity formation, by separating traditional narratives from their status of the past in order to understand their effects on the present and future. The imperialistic, globalizing and war-shaped world community unites more and more cultures in real and virtual mixed spaces. Abdalla provocatively questions how a common world culture can be implemented in which peace is possible. He describes the increasing digitalization culture as a massive influence on the formation of communities and cultural identities: the persistent pursuit of technical developments, people between self-accusation and progress intoxication, the fine line between utopia and dystopia. In his symbolism, which often reminds of technical maps and algorithms, he confronts Western art with suggestions from Eastern cultures, which are engraved in his memories. He takes his inspiration from various sources, such as the portraits of the Old Masters, the ancient cultures, human moving patterns, media images of women and robotic representations of the body. In his works, poetry and hard reality merge into one another. Abdalla has transformed his personal multicultural identity into his very unique artistic language.

The German-Syrian artist Abdulhamid Abdalla was born in a small village near Al Hasakah (Syria), as a son of a farmer with Armenian roots. Already as a child he started painting by scratching on the clay house walls with hard ceramics or making sculptures from clay residues that were made for the bread ovens, the so-called tandurs. At the age of 16 he had his first exhibition in the Arab Cultural Center in Al-Hasakah. He worked on his family’s farm until he moved to Damascus at the age of 18 to study fine arts at the university. Already during his studies, he became one of the most famous artists in Syria. In 2001, he took 3rd place in the competition for young Syrian artists. Numerous national and international exhibitions followed. At the end of 2003, Abdalla decided to leave Syria in order to exchange the weapons he should have carried in military service for brushes and color palette. Abdalla was able to integrate himself very quickly into the new Western cultural environmant and tradition because he has been intensively dealing with other cultures and identities since his youth. Today Abdalla lives and works in Hamburg, Germany.