Muheera & I

Coming from one of the first pioneering generations of the UAE’s fine artists, along with contemporaries such as Hassan Sharif and Najat Makki, Abdulrahim Salim’s work both sketches and paints a distinct portrait of the nation’s cultural past, existing in dialogue with myth, folk tales, spirituality, and historical traditions of the Arabian Gulf. Particularly exploring the female form, figuration and abstraction slash together with equal harmony and dissonance in his Untitled Charcoal sketches on paper, for instance. Other charcoal works incorporate shocks of collage – a single scrap of scarlet paper – embedded into the image, such as in Untitled 112 (2019), like a cymbal clang in a song. It’s rather like the air is perennially smudged, as if in an incensed room, in the atmosphere of Salim’s artworks, nowhere more apparent than in his full-color paintings. Here, the scales are tipped further towards abstraction, where clear visuals appear as if slurried through a water tank, with clear figures or objects appearing more like shoals of fish in movement. Deep indigos, noirs, ruby reds, and jewel tones swim in and out of each other. The effect is mystical, resisting a transparent reading of meaning, more focused on capturing the textures and tints – the essence – of the meaning itself.
Untitled 31, 2022

Acrylic on Canvas

101.5 x 81.5 cm

Salim began making art as a child of eight or nine in Bahrain, when school teachers noticed his lines and colors were simply better than his peers. After finishing secondary school, he returned home briefly to the UAE before departing for Egypt to study sculpture. Egypt, for Salim, was less of a place of learning than it was of discovery. Finding his studies unsatisfactory, he instead gathered inspiration in the museum. “A museum is like a book, a beautiful book of art,” he shares. “It’s a beautiful place for me, like when a child finds a shop of honey or sweets, chocolate or cake.” Looking at the exhibits and the people that perused them, Salim sketched and sketched. And when he completed his studies in Cairo, he came back to the UAE with the vigor to be different from, “not a copy”, of any other artist, unlike the bland roteness he had encountered in college. “So I read a book of magic,” he states, specifically the Ghazali book of magic. “It’s very big, a very difficult and very strange book,” he says, adding that he wanted his art to relate to and reflect that book. In his room, Salim began to practice the black magic rituals laid out in the text on his own, and later only stopped at the behest of his mother. The experience, however, wafted into his artistic style like clinging smoke.
- Untitled 87, 2015
  Abdulrahim Salim
- Untitled 89, 2015
  Abdulrahim Salim
It was at this time Salim’s mother told him of the “true story” of Muheera. Muheera was a woman who lived in Sharjah; upon rejecting a man’s advances, she becomes a victim of his black magic curse, goes mad, and tragically dies in an accidental fire. Salim was taken, “shocked”, by the tale. He sought to capture the story in his work, and thus, an oeuvre was seeded, not only dialogically connecting mythological history with the present, as well as Muheera and Salim, but also that title “Muheera & I” implies a relationship put forth by Salim’s works between Muheeras story and the subjective “I’ of the viewer. What is our gaze and connection with the magic and darkness and allure of this narrative, embedded into the region’s cultural histories of gender, patriarchy, submission, madness, agency, and death?

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- Untitled 81, 1994
  Abdulrahim Salim
- Untitled 96, 2019
  Abdulrahim Salim
Untitled 29, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

130 x 130 cm

The preoccupation with both women’s forms and their stories in Salim’s work is far from accidental. The artist grew up amid women, a whole “society” of them – mothers, grandmothers, aunts. In moments of injury, he ran to one specific aunt, “a very strong woman” he was captivated by. As a child, too, Salim’s grandmother was his creative “judge”. Though supportive and encouraging, she also vitally pushed him to constantly refine his practice, to work more and do better. Aside from this predominantly feminine energy permeating his consciousness and work, Salim is inspired by the greats Michelangelo and Da Vinci, as well as the Futurism art movement from the 70s to the 90s, particularly the work of Francis Bacon. Though Salim consistently maintains a distinct style from any other artist or work. Instead, we find in his pieces, especially the charcoal sketches, glimmers of Michelangelo’s muscularity, perhaps also harking back to Salim’s sculpture studies in Cairo, as well as the weepiness of the deep colors and emotional, abstracted figurations found in Bacon’s works.
Untitled 18, 2022

Acrylic on canvas

150 x 150 cm

Muheera and her story transcend solely being Salim’s muse and become rather his artistic vernacular. The contours of mythology and magic, and their specific transmission within the Gulf, form its grammar. What Muheera & I presents is a relationship beyond artist and muse, more towards the seams between spirituality and reality, eye and imagination, towards a cultural past beamed like a light through the fabric of the present.
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Abdulrahim Salim, Untitled 63, 2000