The world of art meets at Custot Gallery Dubai

Bringing international postwar and contemporary art into the region, Stéphane Custot’s eponymous gallery at Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue district opened this week with the exhibition The World Meets Here. This group show, which includes large-scale sculptures and contemporary artwork, is presented in the unusually designed gallery, with expansive nine metre-high ceilings, from Brussels-based architect Francoise Marcq.

Showcasing international artists such as painters Chu Teh-Chun, Zao Wou-Ki, sculptors Marc Quinn, Pablo Reinoso and French conceptual artist Bernar Venet among others, the inaugural exhibition represents Custot’s experience of more than 25 years in galleries at Paris and London. His ambition for the Dubai gallery is for it to be a space for international modern and contemporary art in the city and the surrounding region.

“The artistic events that I will have the pleasure of presenting will demonstrate my perspective on modern and contemporary artistic creation internationally, from the biggest artistic masters to the most promising emerging artists. This curatorial calendar, supported by the exigency and expertise that are so valuable to me, will be an opportunity to present works in an open dialogue between East and West. To attract appreciation of these artists’ works in Dubai is an ambitious plan, an interesting challenge and a source of great joy,” he says.

The opening exhibition brings together artists who are dispersed not only in their geographical locations, including China, Britain, Russia, France and America, but who also work with varied materials — such as Marc Quinn’s bronze sculpture, Peter Halley’s geometric prints on canvas and Robert Indiana’s steel structure. However, within the gallery these occupy a shared idiom that is contemporary both in its influences and expression.

Seven by Robert Indiana; COR-TEN steel; 1980-2003

American painter, printmaker and sculptor Robert Indiana, best known for his LOVE series from the 1960s, is exhibiting his eight-foot high COR-TEN steel Seven sculpture, depicting the number 7, which mirrors his 1965 canvas work in the way the number is styled. This work is among the sets of sculptures Indiana created in the shape of the numerals 0 to 9. While some of those are brightly coloured, the number seven appears in a warmer, rusty, almost wood-like colour. This sculpture courted controversy in 2014 when it was placed as a permanent fixture outside the Portland Museum of Art, with some residents and eminent figures from the area questioning its relevance as an engaging art piece in a public space.

Another COR-TEN steel sculpture on display at the exhibition is Venet’s work from the Classic-Leaning Arcs series, which, like his other sculptures, examines mathematical and scientific theories. In 1979, there was a shift in Venet’s artistic production as he began the first works in his Indeterminate Lines series and also began to examine his Arcs, Angles, and Straight Lines series. Venet has been commissioned to produce several large public sculptures on sites in Berlin, Denver, Paris, Nice and Tokyo, among other cities. In 2011 he exhibited seven monumental sculptures at the grounds of the Château de Versailles. In 2005, he was named Chevalier de la Legion D’Honneur of France. The International Sculpture Center (ISC) announced that he will be the recipient of their 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Custot Gallery will host his solo exhibition soon after The World Meets Here concludes.

Examining the relationship between architecture and space and drawing on his previous architectural experience, Reinoso’s Milonga is created from shoes, wood and natural fibre. The twisting forms of the installation are reminiscent of his most prominent series, Spaghetti Benches from 2006. These works take anonymous public benches as a starting point and then become transformed into twisting, branch-like elements past the point of their inanimate origins.

The play with gravity can also be seen in the work of American sculptor Jedd Novatt, internationally renowned for his ever-developing series Chaos created in bronze or steel. At the exhibition he is showcasing his bronze and black patina sculpture Chaos Fisura, a balancing act of piling open-space squares and overlapping unequal edges.

Contorted forms appear in London-based Quinn’s The Origin of the World (Cassis madagascariensis) Longitudes, a bronze sculpture that hearkens back to the iconic painting L’Origine du monde (1866) by Gustave Courbet in its nomenclature and symbolism as well as to “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (circa 1482), which shows the deity risen from the sea in a shell, which in classical iconography is seen as a protective and life-giving element. Withdrawal into this symbolic softness, this feeling of security, signifies temporary escape from a reality which many people perceive as increasingly hard; they feel alienated from real life through those after-effects of globalisation which alter social structure — such as the loss of contact with nature, of long-term identity-shaping, and of established tradition, says Quinn.

Among the paintings on display is Frank Stella’s Maze, a signature example of his series of concentric squares and mazes, as well as his method of minimalism, which has had a profound influence on visual art since the 1960s. His geometric paintings are objects that refer to nothing outside themselves; “what you see is what you see”, according to Stella.

As much a colour story is Peter Halley’s Ancillary Control, a striking work on canvas, which showcases his favoured medium of rendering cells, prisons and conduits in fluorescent Day-Glo acrylic paint and Roll-A-Tex texture additive.

His works are “diagrams of the lived experience in a contemporary urban environment, in which social space is ever more divided and geometrised but individuals remain connected via ‘conduits’ of information flows, roadways and electrical grids”.

English abstract painter Ian Davenport presents two paintings from his ‘Poured Lines + Puddle Paintings’ series that bring a sculptural aspect onto the canvas through vivid colors and what he terms “an element of musicality, movement and feeling.”

French abstract painter Fabienne Verdier presents her recent work Ascèse, created using black acrylic on blue background on cotton linen canvas. Verdier, who lives and works in France and Canada, paints vertically in ink, standing directly on her stretchers, using giant brushes and tools that she invented, suspended from the studio ceiling. Her work combines Eastern aspects of unity, spontaneity and asceticism with the line, action and expression of Western painting.

Contemporary art now is more visible than it has ever been at any time in history, though exhibited works that draw most attention in galleries and museums across the world are only a fraction of the art world. For Custot, the focus on Middle East by opening Custot Gallery Dubai was to tap into a market that is situated halfway between Asia and North America.

“Dubai already plays host to an established and respected art fair, Art Dubai, which attracts visitors from all over the world. The gradual establishment of major museums and galleries in Dubai and the wider Middle East region will undoubtedly turn this part of the world into a major new global cultural crossroads. My professional experiences in Western art markets drove me to forge a path for myself, both on a personal and a professional level,” he says.

In 2005, Custot set up the Custot Gallery in London, where he exhibited works by modern and contemporary artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alexander Calder, Nicolas de Staël, Jean Dubuffet, Joan Miró, Joan Mitchell, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Soulages, Frank Stella and others. In 2006, he co-founded the Pavilion of Art and Design, an art fair that has become a key fixture in the arts world calendar in both Paris and London, in the form of PAD Paris and PAD London. In 2010 he joined forces with Leslie Waddington to found the Waddington Custot Galleries. Following from his experiences in Paris and London, in terms of the exhibition programme for the Custot Gallery in Dubai, he aims to offer a comprehensive overview of the international contemporary art scene to both the Dubai audience and those passing through.

Manika Dhama is an independent writer based in Dubai.

The World Meets Here will run at Custot Gallery, Alserkal Avenue, until May 7.