Nottingham Contemporary is pleased to present the second-ever institutional exhibition featuring Algerian-German artist Hamid Zénati (b.1944, Algeria; d.2022, Germany).
Celebrating Zénati’s nearly 60-year career, the exhibition presents to UK audiences for the first time an artist who is still largely unknown, casting him as an inventive, free thinker and artist of his time, whose work continues to inspire today.
A self-taught artist, Zénati nurtured an inherent obsessive creative impulse which saw him experiment across a variety of media and surface, from found objects, textiles, walls and ceramics to photography, fashion and wearable sculpture, in his signature ‘all over’ style.
His intense use of colour and cosmology of pattern created a unique, free and anarchic abstract visual language which disordered hierarchies between fine art, applied arts, crafts and design.
A chameleonic artist, performer and interlocutor of cultures and disciplines, Zénati’s work merges cross cultural references and allusions from geometric abstraction, indigenous Amazigh signs and motifs, to Indonesian ornamental design and Sahrawi traditional garments, sourcing inspiration from postcolonial texts, advertising slogans, to organic forms found in nature.
Press release from Nottingham Contemporary
Image: Hamid Zénati. Textile 176, untitled. Undated. 175 x 102 cm. Image courtesy of the Hamid Zénati Estate
