"Faces and Colourful Remains" at Arab Cultural Club

The exhibition was attended by Ali Al-Mughni, Vice Chairman of the Club's Board of Directors, and an audience of artists and art lovers.

22 sculptures and 49 paintings

The exhibition featured approximately 22 sculptures and 49 paintings, works that complement and harmonise the artists' work in terms of the environment and themes they work on. These themes focus on coastal and marine themes, inspired by the coastal city of Latakia, where they lived between the mountains and the sea. During his beach tours, sculptor Maher Alaa El-Din picks up sandy beach stones and takes them to his home workshop. He then begins reshaping them with great artistic precision and sensitivity, sculpting them into diverse human faces, each expressing a specific emotion. There are: patience and determination, feelings of sadness and worry, joy and happiness, fear and anticipation, courage and hope, etc. The artist says about his works that they mostly represent the faces of sailors he knows well and has lived within the coastal environment in which he lived. These are faces sculpted from the salt and water of the sea, its strength and cruelty, its treachery and generosity, its beauty, and all that is contradictory within it.

 Weaving colours

Hiam Salman creates unconventional designs through the art of sewing. Her raw materials are leftover fabric from tailors or clothes that are no longer used. She gathers them all together and begins sewing them using a needle and thread, creating a beautiful work of art that demonstrates extreme precision in using and sewing very small pieces of fabric. She recycles the leftovers into a wonderful work of art, inspired by an ancient women's craft, where women, with their skilled hands, transformed leftover clothing into useful items such as pot covers, mattresses, and other items. Her paintings are mostly landscapes that mimic the natural environment of the Syrian coast, an environment made up of beaches and mountains covered in greenery. Hiam Salman's works are characterised by their dense and harmonious colour, which demonstrates a great sensitivity to colour, especially since she uses leftover fabric with chaotic shapes and colours, but transforms them into something beautifully coordinated.

Commenting on the exhibition, artist Khalifa Al-Shaimi, the club's artistic activities officer, said: "The works of artist Hiam Salman represent what is called the 'easy yet impossible' art. Recycling tiny pieces of cloth to create beautiful scenes using a needle and sewing is a wonderful work and demonstrates tremendous artistic ability. This type of artwork is rare, and perhaps only comparable to the art of Khayamiya in Egypt, which is the art of making colourful fabrics that were used to make tents. As for the works of artist Maher, they demonstrate his ability to create different figures from sea stones, expressing the environment in which he lived."