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YASER DWEIK YASER DWEIK

YASER DWEIK, Palestine (1940)

Bio

Born in 1940, in Hebron, Palestine, Yaser Dweik is a Palestinian visual artist based in Jordan. His practice spans across painting, drawing, etching, printmaking. He studied Fine Arts in Baghdad...

Born in 1940, in Hebron, Palestine, Yaser Dweik is a Palestinian visual artist based in Jordan. His practice spans across painting, drawing, etching, printmaking. He studied Fine Arts in Baghdad and Graphic Arts in Britain. In Amman, he taught art at Jordanian Community Colleges, such as Howara College, for more than a decade from 1973 till 1984. He later worked as an instructor and supervisor in the field of Fine Arts in Dubai, UAE, from 1985 till 1999, becoming the Senior Fine Arts Supervisor at the Ministry of Education and Youth in UAE from 2000 to 2002. Moreover, Dweik is a scriptwriter and had presented more than forty TV episodes related to visual arts in both Amman and Sharjah. He is a member of the Jordan Fine Arts Association.

In his early years, Dweik depicted Jerusalem and daily life in Palestine. He painted arcades and shady alleyways in the old souk of Jerusalem and mosques with minarets enclosed in a cluster of vaulted houses. However, following the devastating 1967 Arab-Israeli war - the Naksa - when the West Bank and Gaza fell under Israeli military occupation, Dweik fled Palestine to Jordan and remained there. It was a turning point in the artist's life. Like many Palestinian artists who were displaced, Dweik sought to pronounce his grief and disappointment and express the collective dream of return. As of then, his themes revolved around nostalgia, struggle, and loss. He produced paintings featuring peasantry and veiled women dressed in embroidered robes, an iconography adopted by many modernist artists in the 1970s as a symbol of the motherland.

At a later stage, especially when he became acquainted with the art of etching and printmaking, Dweik's work shifted into abstraction, taking over his formal figurative style. He produced print works showing blurry images in black and white and others, including calligraphic representations against colorful backgrounds. Dweik painted deconstructed clustered buildings in an impressionistic style based on fragmented geometrical shapes and gradation of color. In his mixed-media emblematic creations, he adopted basic shapes such as a circle to represent the sun and a disc for the moon. Dweik's most dramatic depictions are those in a monochromatic rustic palette featuring agonized human figures awaiting return. Yaser Dweik lives and works in Amman, Jordan.

This is a short biography. The full version , along with research, CV and sources will be posted soon. Stay tuned and visit us often or become a member to be notified of our updates.

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CV

Selected Group Exhibitions

2017

One Hundred Years Closer to Communism: Art and Revolution in the Middle East,American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon

2015

Imago Mundi. Luciano Benetton Collection. Mappa dell’arte nuova, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, Italy

2000

Journey through the Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Darat al Funun – The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman, Jordan

Collections

Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon
Darat al Funun – The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman, Jordan
Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

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Exhibitions

YASER DWEIK Artwork

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