Athar Jaber

possibilities. Against the established myth of every stone hiding a singular form to carve, the sculptor believes in multiple potentials to reveal within. The ‘issue’, the Abu Dhabi-based artist thinks, is “to choose which figure to discover”. He eschews the romanticised search for the resolute in marble-carving and pursues a rather lingering exploratory introspection. The process of shedding the stone, in this case, proposes a duel between intuitive decision-making and raw elimination. “You sacrifice the million other bodies in there,” he tells Canvas. 

Athar generally relies on direct carving, an historical method which allows him to sculpt without the proposal of a clay sketch. The revelatory promise throughout the process lends the artist a figurative exploration, as much as the riveting prospect of uncharted creative urges genuine to his practice. Besides the expected, in every jab Athar encounters crisp cues about his own endeavour. The artist’s closest comparison to this journey is a sonic one which also blossoms out of braving the unknown. “This is similar to a jazz improvisation in which you have the knowledge and the technique, but you don’t know yet about the result,” he maintains. This very knowledge relies on his innate determination to eventually unveil a body, as well as, on the other hand, an awareness towards what to omit. “You may not know what you want, but you likely know what you don’t want”, is a philosophy he often pursues to balance his own flesh-and-bone physicality with that of the marble in its process of corporal formation.

In Athar’s recent exhibition, Vestiges, at Dubai’s Ayyam Gallery, Marble Figure – Opus 4 nr. 4 (2018) displayed an autonomous battle which was contained within the Carrara marble’s gloriously pristine materiality. Limbs wrapped around a hefty torso and a single foot atop dominate the enigmatic entanglement. At first glance, the viewer’s eye might glimpse a bust commonly rendered in marble throughout art history. The impression, however, would quickly fade into a face-off between figuration and abstraction. As discernible as it is, the body – in fact singular, despite the initial impression of a dual fight – slips into the abstract while still defiantly claiming its representation. The combat eventually settles on the in-between, where the viewer’s full circle around the sculpture conveys a suite of bodily sights, blended with whispers of abstraction. 

Athar partially owes the fluid handling of unfamiliar surfaces across his figures to the decision to reveal chisel marks. The intention not only demystifies the technical mystery behind an art form that is as old as time but also ties the artist’s practice to its canonised – and often fetishised – precursors. “The ancient busts and torsos at museums are all in some form of decay”, he says. “The falling apart of things through time eventually mirrors our own decay.” The same Dubai show also featured Marble Head – Opus 5 nr. 2 and Child’s Head – Opus 5 nr. 9 (both 2015), which both alluded to typical busts in which facial likeness historically reaches its utter excellence in representation. In Athar’s hands, tradition morphs into a tactile ritual, a diaristic treasury of the stone’s face-off with the chisel in the artist’s hand. The synchrony of control and chance yields beauty in its own authenticity, one that is unburdened by art history’s imposed hierarchies. “I see beauty in the truth,” the artist explains. “If a work represents itself with fidelity, that is beautiful, even if this means showing pain.” Honesty translates into both a commitment to his own pledge to disobey the genre’s ranks of beauty and a susceptibility to the sociopolitical circumstances of the particular time. Violence, therefore, is a reality reflected equally in his sculptural gestures and the thematic concerns which they bear. Not unlike Picasso, El Greco or Bacon, whose illustrations of human atrocities relied on warping the conventional beauty, Athar problematises the appealing norm for our technology-trained eyes. In the cacophony of AI-generated ideals peppered between real images of ongoing terrors, the incredibly tactile emblems of intentional flaws and unfinished ends disrupt our hallucinated vision. The abject within the incomplete even feels soothing. 

Athar’s PhD degree on the connection of sculpture to violence, from the University of Antwerp, expands the artist’s given poetic lens with a critical outlook to the subject. “If you look at the images of ISIS or others destroying antiquities,” he suggests, “you notice that they use tools similar to mine.” He sees in the gestures and techniques of systemic violence a similarity to his toll-taking blows onto the stone, “but the intention is different”. A resourceful territory for inspiration is this contrast within the inherently aggressive, even brutal, physicality of stone-carving and its search for aesthetic reverie through softness. Unlike the corporal impeccability common – or even expected – in marble sculpture, however, Athar’s forms mediate on violence with the decisive blemishes on their immediate appearances.

The invitation to pause and contemplate was evident in Clearing (2024), which was a part of late 2024’s Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial. Carved out of a mammoth limestone block, the hollow silhouette of a body invited passersby to walk through its fleeting absence. In contrast to the material’s tectonic strength and time-defiant durability, the spectral body at first glance embodied weightlessness. The procession through the grand void, however, echoed with demise, one that is not only determined by time or fate but also sits in the hands of human greed. 

Athar offsets marble’s brutal solidity with his quest into the open-ended nature of identity. Born to Iraqi artist parents in Rome, he grew up surrounded by the inspirational outpouring of his motherland’s creative diaspora. “I was drawing before I could speak,” he remembers. Growing up in the Italian language amid the open-air museum streets of Florence, he learned to see beauty beyond the material layers of objects. The influence of those “afternoons and nights just looking at architecture” led to a decision to study art, particularly sculpture, which seemed a “mystery” to resolve. “I was living with painters at home, so I was familiar with it,” he says. Then came late teenage years in the Netherlands and a formal art education at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. 

Manoeuvring through Europe’s social and academic circles with an Arabic name immediately imposed on him the impossibility of eschewing the reality of identity in life and work. “I have never lived long enough in a place to identify with its culture,” he adds. In the West – where he was born and raised – he was always considered a foreigner, and back in the Gulf, where he recently settled, he is striving to adapt to his roots. “Wherever you go, they can put you in a box,” he notes, but he continues to challenge the status quo through embracing malleability in his approach to marble. In Putto – Opus 13 nr. 2 (2018), a bubbling formation radiates the innate sheen of the marble. The fungus-like mount seems to germinate an impending stage – ingrained into the past yet stretched out to the future, the swollen abstraction teeters between places and time. “My carving has been informed by a multicultural background,” adds Athar. “The sculptures are raw and even look unfinished, just like us humans, who will never be complete.” 

This profile first appeared in Canvas 119: Body Language