Adel Al-Abbasi

Fine Arts Exhibition - Bahrain National Museum

Source: ArtBahrain.org
Feb 2011


25 JANUARY
37th Annual
Fine Arts Exhibition
Bahrain National Museum

Bahrain Art Week commenced with the highly anticipated Annual Fine Arts Exhibition last 25 January. The annual exhibition is a juried show that has been running for 37 years under the patronage of HRH Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, the Prime Minister of Bahrain. It was the first major art event and is distinguished as one of the longest standing award programmes in the Arabian Gulf region.

The 37th Annual Fine Arts Exhibition celebrates and rewards Bahraini contemporary visual artists who are working independently at a high level of artistic maturity. This year, the art-world validators considered more than 50 entries by artists working mostly on painting and sculpture relevant to the theme “Water: Startling and Still.”

HRH Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa congratulated the award winners and honoured the contribution of all the participants.

The highly coveted Al Dana prize, the signature award, honours Adel Mohammed Al Abbasi whose sculptural assemblages of faucets were strikingly different. He is the thirty-seventh recipient of the award given to a Bahraini artist that is meant to encourage the artist’s future development and experimentation.

Honourable mentions went to paintings by: Balqees Fakhro -ecological overtones that reveals autonomous energy; Riyadh Mansoor - display of avant-gardist impulses; and Hadir Al Bukhari - decorative abstraction of meticulous multiple overlapping systems.

As the Annual Fine Arts Exhibition is a firmly established part of the Kingdom of Bahrain’s annual visual art diary, it is a convergence of Bahraini artists that provides a fascinating glimpse into the Bahraini contemporary art practice which should not be missed. The exhibition will run until 25 February at the Bahrain National Museum.


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