Where Gesture Meets Story – recent art from the Yes Collection
— The Arts Club, Dubai
Installation view: Where Gesture Meets Story – recent art from the Yes Collection
Installation view: Where Gesture Meets Story – recent art from the Yes Collection
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In September 2024, The Arts Club Dubai opened its latest Stairway Exhibition: Where Gesture Meets Story – recent art from the Yes Collection. Brainchild of Dubai based collector Charles Al Sidaoui, the Yes Collection is made up of diverse international Modern and Contemporary Art, all selected with passion and intellectual curiosity. Focusing in on contemporary works from the Yes Collection, The Arts Club Dubai’s curated selection is divided over two floors following two themes – ‘Rethinking the Figure’ on the first floor the Club, and ‘Contemporary Abstraction’ on the second floor.
Each choice is driven by his intuitive response to paintings: “I buy what I love, from around the world. Hung together, it’s like the paintings talk to each other. They find common ground and appreciate difference and co-exist with harmony and texture – art is an international language.”
The exhibition is the latest of the Club’s ongoing series that shines a light on important private collections from the Middle East. Previous exhibitions were selected from the collections of Lebanese collector Elie Khouri (2021) and Iranian collector Farhad Farjam (2023).
Both figuration and abstraction have been key movements in painting over the past two decades, addressing key issues affecting our world, intimate and individual perspectives and driving forth the language of contemporary art.
Among those represented are Farah Atassi (Belgium), Rebecca Ackroyd (Britain), Vojtěch Kovařík (Czech Republic), Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (Britain), Enrico Riley (USA) and Maxwell Alexandre (Brazil) on Floor 1; and Ahmed Alsoudani (Iraq), Xiyao Wang (China), Ablade Glover (Ghana) and Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim (UAE) and more on Floor 2. Together these artists present a compelling vision of both the use of figurative art to tell the socio-political stories of our time, and the bold approaches to gesture, colour and feeling at the heart of new waves in abstraction.