Richard Saltoun Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition with new works by Edinburgh-based, Egyptian born artist, Fathi HASSAN (b. 1957, Egypt), fusing his distinctive calligraphic motifs with a rich visual iconography drawn from his Nubian heritage. This will be Hassan's first exhibition at the gallery, following his participation in the 2023 Sharjah Biennial. I can see you smiling Fatma highlights Hassan's engagement with the experience of migration, dislocation, diasporic identity, and shifting notions of heritage through language, iconography, memory, and mythmaking.
These themes will be further expanded through his subsequent solo exhibition, Fathi Hassan: Shifting Sands, with The Sunderland Collection at No.9 Cork Street (May 31 - June 15, 2024), unveiling a new body of work created in response to items from The Sunderland Collection – an extraordinary private collection of rare antique world and celestial maps. For this show, the artist uses maps as a lens, incorporating motifs and images that have recurred throughout his practice, and drawing in new influences such as thinkers and creatives who have had a global influence on science or culture across borders.
Hassan was born in Cairo in 1957 to Nubian and Egyptian parents. His family were forced to leave their homeland of Nubia when the Aswan High Dam was built in 1952, flooding a vast area now under Lake Nasser. In his early twenties, he received a grant to study at Naples Art School, taking him to Italy where he developed his practice and gained artistic prominence. International recognition for his work grew exponentially in the 1980s, as one of the first African and Arab artists to be showcased at the Venice Art Biennale in 1988 curated by Dan Cameron and Giovanni Carandenti, in the ‘Aperto 88’ section.
Since then Hassan has been exhibited internationally, particularly in the Middle East, Italy and more recently the UK, where he relocated in 2018. His personal history, marked by constant movement and displacement has been a key influence on his artistic practice and the exhibition concept.
The works in the exhibition continue Hassan’s excavation of his Nubian heritage. Incorporating images, colours and materials evoking cultural relics, cartographic fragments, and the essence of the landscape, these evocative compositions are layered with enigmatic inscriptions of ancient languages erased by colonialism. Though rooted in Kufic calligraphy, these scripts remain purposefully indecipherable, challenging the socio-cultural constructs of language and suggesting alternative ways of interpreting the relationship between text and image, the signifier and the signified.
His portraits of Nubian Warriors are depicted against ornamental backgrounds populated by patterns, animals and people in a highly narrative, almost hieroglyphic style. Many of Hassan’s works bear imprints of his profound personal journey, paying homage to figures from revered philosophers to cherished family members, notably his mother, Fatma, to whom the exhibition is dedicated Thus, Hassan's exhibition serves as a poignant meditation on displacement, diasporic identity, and the multifaceted layers of language, distilled through the prism of his personal autobiography.
