Visual artist
Biography
He is a contemporary artist born in Syria in 1995, based in Dubai. In 2014, he moved to Damascus to study at the Faculty of Fine Arts, and graduated in 2018 with a specialization in Graphic Arts (Printmaking), a field that has left a clear imprint on his current artistic practice. Nawar embodies what the human self undergoes in terms of the blending of emotions and thought, and its deep connection to the surrounding world, through an approach that combines philosophical sensibility with technical precision. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Syria, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, and Dubai, and his works have received media coverage and multiple critical reviews.
Statement
Between behaving rationally or with emotional prejudice, Nawar Shartouh’ s creative zeal is inspired by his attempts to surrender to the intangible on one hand, and the visual on the other. We recall the academic who is attuned to the values of the architecture and the inner workings of building and growth through his use of the golden ratio, as well as he who is occupied with sweeping as many objects and bodies that could be crafted with his tools and experiences available to the visual arts and merging them so that the different elements converge in the throes of conflict or the pinnacle of love. Through making use of vocational knowledge and craftsmanship, undergoing training to displace emptiness with labor and transcend moments, as well as enjoying the transition from familiar to foreign spaces, Nawar undergoes an artistic rebirth. He seeks to seduce our senses with his dissertations on aesthetics. His gears shift with regards to his dedications to the paths, secrets, topics, and horizons he unlocks as he goes, revealing them visually with his prowess as a printmaker and showcasing his array of tools on wide pictorial surfaces. What order can bring together this chaos, or rather, which chaos can bring forth such structure? Be it overlay or juxtaposition, clash or dependence, it seems as if it were a dense downpour of ash from a volcano, with Nawar watching the aftermath of the eruption and reshaping the bareness thereafter.
Selected Works
