- Venue
- Creative Hinckley Gallery at the Atkins Building
- Location
- East Midlands
The current exhibition of drawings at the Gallery is the work of the Iraq born artist Satta Hashem.
The artist, much travelled and educated in several countries, now lives and works in Leicester, UK.
The exhibition consists of 12 large drawings on various papers utilising a range of materials including graphite pencil, charcoal and water colour and 8 smaller, framed studies in pen and ink.
All of these works, both large and small, draw upon a number of significant sources and references across a range of cultures and periods. So here we can find references, for example, to Greek Myth, Richard III, the Iraq War, the Plague and World War 1.
The subject matter is war and conflict and the the related themes of life and death. The artist’s most impressive technical and compassionate treatment of these themes invites comparison with the English sculptor Henry Moore’s great series of Shelter Drawings executed during the second World War and the wonderfully well observed and documented paintings of Ship Builders by Stanley Spencer (also completed when Spencer was an official war artist).
The larger drawings are fixed directly to the wall without framing or glazing and the intention here is to convey the impact of mural painting and to set the drama in a more immediate public space.
When talking about the work, the artist explains that the choice of colours, Black and Red, is most important and that he intends these to be read as symbolic. In the catalogue notes Satta Hashem explains that these two colours are “heavily freighted with meaning” and the use of these colours goes back “to the beginning of humanity on earth” where they were used to decorate caves and holy places and sites which were used for magic ceremonies.
The smaller, framed drawings seem to be more about the process of drawing and are a celebration of the way that shapes and forms can emerge from a more unconscious way of playing with line and composition. In these drawings, figures emerge, sometimes isolated, from a tangled background of lines and unstructured ‘scribbling’ which strongly conveys the vulnerable individual caught up in the chaos of war.
There is another, very important, concern for this artist and that is the role, or position, of women within these areas of conflict. To this end, several pieces include references to ‘Widows’ and ‘Mothers’ and, in some, the male figures of the dead or dying can be seen in the protective embrace of the female figures. These are quite reminiscent of the Pieta where the figure of the dead Christ is held by the Virgin.
Satta Hashem is represented by work in a number of important collections including the British Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Kaliningrad, Russia, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery and Stockholm City Council.
Peter Berry May 2014
