OMAR HASSAN. Now. 2020.

Omar Hassan (Milan, 1987), with an Italian mother and Egyptian father, grew up in the middle of two different cultures and this gave him a deep curiosity about the new, the different, and the outside world.

He is a research artist, graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera Milan in the Painting course held by Alberto Garutti, a great exponent of Italian contemporary art. The conceptual influence breathed during his studies at the Academy left an important means for the artist to express his painting and his sculpture, always with a deep thought and meaning behind each work.

Obsessed and enchanted by the pictorial gestures of synthesis of the great masters like Fontana, Pollock, and Manzoni, he as well grounds his artistic experimentation in the simple contemporary gestures able to enclose and tell an entire philosophy, an entire culture, or a new concept. It is thus that a spray spray, the first real breath of the spray can, incorporates the signifier of the entire Street Art culture, the series entitled “Injections” (the most famous works, the 256 cover of La Lettura by Corriere della Sera) is born .

These gestures were also taken by Omar in his dialogues between painting and sculpture, in the institutional exhibition at the Chiesetta della Misericordia in Venice, during the last Biennial of Art. The sculptures were camouflaged in the paintings, but also within the location, because the artist likes to work and create works ad hoc, by mixing them and by following the original essence of the space.

“Breaking Through” is another series linked to the synthesis of the gesture; the punch is charged with all the values of a discipline in one sign: “I’m not punching to destroy, I’m creating”. Boxing, the Noble Art is thus celebrated in a series of 121 large canvases (180x 200 cm) all unique pieces: 121 are the number of rounds played by the artist during his brief boxing career.

He wanted to highlight within his research, the conceptual aspect of this sport: “boxing is the metaphor of life par excellence, each of us has his crosses and must fight, if we fall to the ground we must stand up again, we have breaks, in a corner, but then we are forced to fight again, each of us is the boxer of our experience ”.

All the pictorial gestures are marked by time, a constant very dear to Omar Hassan who inserts it in all his works, especially in the last series “Time Lines”, presented at the Villa Reale in Monza, where the canvases represent the real wall of work in the artist’s studio, which for years has covered the walls with canvas, as if it were a real tapestry, marking the date when it is assembled, white and clean, and the date when it is removed, marked by the work done: “from 5/3/2016 to 5/3/2018 “work title, two years of studio work”.

The desire to trace the time to give importance to everything behind things. After exhibiting in Tokyo, London, New York, Miami, Singapore he returned to Italy to set up two major institutional exhibitions, the first confirmed in Naples in February 2020 at the Palazzo delle Arti with the curation of Maria Savarese and in Milan to be defined, because of Covid-19 emergency.