Artist

Khalid Al Banna

Born in Sharjah, 1975 and lives in Sharjah, UAE

Khalid Al Banna was born in 1975 in Sharjah, where he currently lives and works. He is a contemporary Emirati artist who has staked his place in the local art scene since the early 90s, renowned now for using collage as a primary technique to explore subject matter pertinent to the history and rapid transformations of his home country.

Initially dabbling in drawings and sketches, he was a wunderkind of sorts.His passion for artmaking manifested at school, when his love for and dedication to improving his drawing technique caught the attention of his teachers who nominated him to partake in several drawing competitions.Later, and in the absence of formal Visual Arts education in the Emirates of the 1990s, Al Banna graduated with a BA in Architectural Engineering from UAE University in Al Ain where he learned the principals of dimension, form and space, which premise his practice both visually and structurally today. What he learned theoretically in the halls of higher education guided his explorations in the studio and propelled him to join extracurricular student clubs which led to early exposure and participation in student-organised exhibitions and initiatives. It is during these formative years that Al Banna’s identity as an artist was crystallised, further refined by his bold explorations of diverse media and material and a hellbent attempt at emancipating his technique from the confines of the modernist approach.

By 1997, Al Banna joined the Emirates Fine Arts Society which served as a springboard for national recognition and institutional support. As a result, he participated early in his career in several prominent exhibitions in Abu Dhabi’s Cultural Foundation (Emirates in the eyes of its artists, 1989) Sharjah International Arts Biennial’s 4th Session (1999) and was one of the artists representing the UAE during Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany (2000) amongst many.

Al Banna’s work is a reflection of his world view. Drawing primarily from elements of design, his canvas is the negative space and his art is life projected against it. His fascination with world-building, borrowed from the field of architecture, gave rise to his hallmark Black and White collages: a diaristic series of abstract paper works using ink and collage which foreground process.In these greyscale mosaics, the artist imposes colour constraints to excavate the endless possibilities of two opposing elements and to execute delicately dynamic drawings that freeze-frame a moment in time. He weaves together vague depictions of his landscape, the past and the present as well as blurry scenes from world affairs as experienced through his status quo. In repeated layers, he rips his paper with his hands, establishing connection with the medium, each time at random angles, then reattaches it to the source, so as to have each cut form a unique shape in endless permutations. This unpretentious haptic process strips the work of its inscribed meaning and turns it into raw matter, reengineered through colour, shape and form.

Al Banna has participated in several prominent exhibitions, including Al Burda Endowment Exhibition at Manarat Al Sadiyat, Abu Dhabi (2019), Portrait of a Nation, Abu Dhabi Festival, (2016) which traveled to me Collectors Room Berlin / Olbricht Foundation, Berlin (2017) as well as Kennedy center, Washington DC (2010) in addition to group exhibitions in France and Austria. He took part in the Emirates Fine Arts Society’s annual exhibitions since 1998 where, in 2006, he staged his first solo exhibition.

His works are held in the collections of the Sharjah Art Museum, Barjeel Art Foundation, Abu Dhabi Music & Art Foundation (ADMAF),UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Culture and Knowledge Development, the Culture Department of Sharjah and the UAE embassy in the USA

Exhibitions
Exhibitions
Swatch Art Peace Hotel
Swatch and Alserkal Advisory are happy to welcome you to the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, based in Shanghai and celebrated here at the vibrant Dubai based Alserkal Avenue.
08 Mar 2022 - 31 Mar 2022
Alserkal Avenue
Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi
Exhibitions
Domestic Affairs
Stories told, untold, aspects of daily life, personal and collected memories, and the ever changing urban...
22 Jun 2016 - 08 Sep 2016
Isabelle van den Eynde
Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi
Exhibitions
Portrait of a Nation
The exhibition puts together 50 contemporary artists from the UAE, a country which was founded in 1971...
13 Sep 2017 - 29 Oct 2017
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