What Lies beneath colour
Hafez Gallery – Jeddah , Saudi Arabia
23 January – 6 April 2023
What lies beneath colour is the first large-scale retrospective of the work by Saudi Arabian artist Dr. Sami Al Marzoogi. The exhibition brings together more than 150 drawings and paintings the self-taught artist, who has a background in Radiology, produced between 1986 and 2022. While formally diverse, Al Marzoogi’s prolific oeuvre reveals the artist’s decades-long quest for uncovering the transformational potential of colour and line through an expressive visual language that resides at the borderline between figuration and abstraction.
Throughout the exhibition, realistic and abstract-looking landscape views, deconstructed human figures, intricate geometric patterns, organic motifs, and fluid colour explorations rendered in ink, watercolours, acrylics, pastels, pencil colours, and polychromes bring forth the artist’s keen sensibility, drawing skills, and ability to create abstractions of what surrounds him. While escaping all labels and remaining true to his own creative path that started later on in his life, Al Marzoogi’s works take the viewer through the artist’s introspective life journey, one in which he has unearthed the many emotions of colour.