DANA AWARTANI | DODECAHEDRON WITHIN AN ICOSAHEDRON (FROM THE PLATONIC SOLID DUALS SERIES)

Athr Gallery, Jeddah

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2016

Roxane Zand, Ed., Geometry and Art: In the Modern Middle East, Milan 2019, pp. 62-63, illustrated in colour  

Sotheby’s is delighted to offer an outstanding selection of works, unparalleled in quality, brought together by a true avant-garde collector from the Middle East. A Maverick Eye comprises a kaleidoscopic group of works from a meticulously curated collection; one unbridled in passion and built from an extraordinarily deep fascination with art and its creation.

Eschewing the ease of following popular trends, the present collection was assembled with a concentration on quality and through a critical survey of the burgeoning rise of the Middle Eastern Contemporary art scene from the early 2000s. Over the span of 20 years, the collection, in its breadth and depth, demonstrated a voracious appetite for collecting and a relentless pursuit of truly thought-provoking works.

A Maverick Eye is a collection characterised by a global constellation of artists. Its edge, perhaps, is in juxtaposing young artists with exceptional works alongside long forgotten female artists. The collection maintains a pedagogical element with a focus on conceptual coherence. A Maverick Eye offers collectors a unique opportunity to survey some of the most innovative artists whose works have been chosen through a discerning commitment to quality and uniqueness. Part II of A Maverick Eye will be sold in our Contemporary Curated Sale in London on 19 November 2019.

At a time where commentary and cultural production truly seems awash with misinformed or ill directed hubris – intentionality, clarity and purpose feel like the essence of luxury. It is in this vein that Sotheby’s is proud to be presenting for the first time at auction, a work by one of the most vibrant artists of a generation, Dana Awartani’s Dodecahedron Within an Icosahedron.

Palestinian-Saudi Dana Awartani was born and raised in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia where she currently resides. She received her BA in Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and received a distinction after a two-year Masters at the Princes School of Traditional Arts to refine her skills in Islamic art form. Her artistic career thus far can perhaps simply be understood as a conflation of contemporary practice and traditional art forms using mixed methodology.

Intentional in its physicality, and in its cosmological and philosophical underpinnings, Awartani shows us the precarious and perfect poetics of a mathematical approach towards creative output. Geometry is of course synonymous with symmetry and the beauty derived from it is an age-old appreciation: Islamic, Sufi, the art of miniatures, and indeed, all spiritual traditions - Western and Eastern - are anchored in the clairvoyance and solace that linearity can bring. However, it is the scale of this work that brings this power into a more contemporary placement. The fragility of the glass, the rigidity of the copper framing and the encasing of a beautifully crafted delicate nucleus alter the space this work sits in and our subsequent movement around it. Equally important, alongside the visceral pull of this work, Awartani continues to gently fuse the lineage of Islamic craftsmanship, its motifs and tessellations with contemporary practice.

The platonic solids are the most frequently studied shapes in history. What makes them particularly important is that they are considered as the only five ‘perfect ‘shapes in three-dimensional space which derive from a sphere. They appear the same from any vertex, their faces are made of the same regular shape, and their vertices represent the most symmetrical distribution of the numbers four, six, eight, twelve and twenty within a sphere.

Awartani has taken direct inspiration from these forms and has translated these three-dimensional shapes into five sculptures that examine the dual properties that these shapes share which is also known as polar reciprocation. By this duality principle, each platonic solid has a pair that fits within each other in geometric harmony.

In her rendering, Awartani has worked with craftsmen in Morocco and created the core shapes in wood, applying her own unique visual language of sacred geometry through traditional wood working techniques. These shapes in their perfection had also been attributed to the five classical elements (earth, air, fire, water, aether) by Plato, and the wood is a tie to this being the only substance that needs all elements to survive in nature.

A quiet and gentle presence, but powerful and assured in its scale, Dodecahedron Within an Icosahedron can be felt as both bold and delicately divine. Dana Awartani is an artist who shows us that an ambitious, harmonious duality can exist in times like this – and thoughts of a separation between tradition, craft and contemporary, conceptual practice are the only belief systems that should remain rooted in the past.