Abu Dhabi Art

Spanning both painting and sculpture, this new body of work engages with the spiritual architecture of Islam, drawing explicit references to the five pillars of faith, as well as to key cultural practices, and reflects on their resonance with universal forces found in nature.

THK Gallery welcomes viewers to view Salaam’s body of work at Abu Dhabi Art, at booth M2 at Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi from the 20th to the 24th of November 2024. This presentation follows on an explorative year for Abdus Salaam, following his residency at the NIROX Foundation, where he worked with foraged stone from the Cradle of Humankind and later in Pietrasanta, Italy at the Giorgio Angeli Residency where he expanded his material practice to include the iconic Carrara marble native to the region.

The exhibition is an immersive dialogue between the divine and the material, bridging the sacred with the natural world. Inspired by the forms of prayer, seeds, flowers, the pilgrimage of Hajj, the fasting of Ramadan, and Abu Dhabi’s rich pearl-diving heritage, Abdus Salaam’s latest works weave together the symbolic and the transcendental, offering a meditation on the unity that binds all of existence. This is, by all accounts, his most ambitious and comprehensive solo presentation to date at the fair.

Abdus Salaam

Child, Mother, Earth , 2024

Child, Mother, Earth, is an emotional reflection on the primal, universal bond between mother and child. Carved from a single block of Namibian Desert Rose marble, the sculpture takes the form of the "kern," one of the most elemental sculptural shapes, imbued with a profound sense of tenderness and love. It gestures to the profound cycles of creation, nurturing, and life.

Abdus Salaam

Abdus Salaam (b. 1989) is a visual artist who lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

Salaam is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist inspired by natural beauty, ecology and spirituality. Salaam reveals a sensitivity to three- dimensional spatial expression and the metaphysical connotations inherent in nature, materials, forms and colours. Contemporary in his mystic abstraction, his work is rooted in poetry, calling from a familiar place to a state of peaceful and intensive longing, using materials to explore the immaterial and always working alone to imbue his intention into his work. Moving freely between mediums – from sculpture to painting, video, photographic ‘light paintings’, poetry, augmented reality, and music – he creates poetic worlds, from the intimate to large-scale installation.

His work is a cultural fusion of Western, Eastern and African sensibilities, shaped by his international coming of age and rooted in the dramatic landscapes around Cape Town, where his earliest memories were shaped on a farm, spending time painting and sculpting with natural materials in the mountains of South Africa with his mother.

Salaam is represented in collections locally and abroad, including the Mohammed Afkhami and EKARD Collections. He held two sold out solo presentations in 2022, both at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair and Abu Dhabi Art. In 2023 Salaam was a finalist in the Art Figura Prize, culminating in an exhibition in Perla Castrum Museum in Schwartzenberg Castle, Germany. In 2023 he was selected as the artist in residence for the prestigious Institute of Public Architecture’s Blockhouse Residency on Governor’s Island, New York. In November 2023, he presented a second sold out presentation at Abu Dhabi Art.

In 2024, Salaam completed a residency at the prestigious Nirox Foundation, followed by a critically acclaimed exhibition. In June 2024, he completed the Giorgio Angeli Residency in Pietrasanta, Italy.

Abdus Salaam

Abdus Salaam

Abdus Salaam

Abdus Salaam

Abdus Salaam

Abdus Salaam

Abdus Salaam

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