Richard Höglund: Desert Octave

Custot Gallery Dubai presents “Richard Höglund: Desert Octave”, the rst exhibition of the American artist in Dubai and the region, curated by Kamiar Maleki.

This new cycle of paintings is part of the lifelong series of dynamic works entitled Sea Pictures describing portraiture as gesture in time and inspired by modernist approaches to representing the human spirit. Höglund states that “with Sea Pictures, I wanted to indicate a man by his index; by his trace rather than his likeness. I wanted to indicate humanity through mark and measure”. Höglund was particularly inspired by William Wordsworth’s sonnet entitled “Nuns Fret Not at their Convent’s Narrow Room” in the development of Sea Pictures.

Desert Octave features a new direction in the artist’s practice where he explores working on linen with new materials such as Sahara sand mixed with bone dust. Höglund experiments the synergy between these natural media and their melodic interaction with spirituality, language and poetry. He remarks “I have never been to the Arabian Desert, though I have thought of it many times, most of my knowledge comes from an outsider. The romanticism of a place imagined has its own purity, in that it has not been tainted with experience. The title of the exhibition Desert Octave indicates the incomplete nature of the poetic endeavour.”