Lot 37: Untitled (from the 'Waw' Series)

ABDUL KADIR AL-RAIS (UAE, B. 1951)
Untitled (from the 'Waw' Series)
watercolour on paper
40 x 60in. (101.6 x 152.4cm.)
Painted in 2007

Abdul Kadir Al-Raes is the best-known artist from the UAE. Simultaneously he paints in two very different styles. For his landscape and architectural scenes, his style is photorealistic, very keenly observed, with a delicate beige palette set off by flashes of blue. More recently he has also begun to paint abstract works and abstracted paintings involving the Arabic letterform, often with a much richer colouring of vivid reds, blues and yellows. What unites both is his signature of small floating squares, which appear even in the most realistic of his paintings.

Abdul Kadir works in both oil and watercolour, for both his photorealist paintings and for his abstract and Arabic letter-based pieces. Watercolours are usually painted in smaller sizes, but the present lot is unusual in that has been produced in a very large scale.