Bio

Khalid Al Banna was born in 1975 in Sharjah, where he currently lives and works. He is a contemporary Emirati artist who has staked his place in the local art scene since the early 90s, renowned now for using collage as a primary technique to explore subject matter pertinent to the history and rapid transformations of his home country.

Initially dabbling in drawings and sketches, he was a wunderkind of sorts.His passion for artmaking manifested at school, when his love for and dedication to improving his drawing technique caught the attention of his teachers who nominated him to partake in several drawing competitions.Later, and in the absence of formal Visual Arts education in the Emirates of the 1990s, Al Banna graduated with a BA in Architectural Engineering from UAE University in Al Ain where he learned the principals of dimension, form and space, which premise his practice both visually and structurally today. What he learned theoretically in the halls of higher education guided his explorations in the studio and propelled him to join extracurricular student clubs which led to early exposure and participation in student-organised exhibitions and initiatives. It is during these formative years that Al Banna’s identity as an artist was crystallised, further refined by his bold explorations of diverse media and material and a hellbent attempt at emancipating his technique from the confines of the modernist approach.

By 1997, Al Banna joined the Emirates Fine Arts Society which served as a springboard for national recognition and institutional support. As a result, he participated early in his career in several prominent exhibitions in Abu Dhabi’s Cultural Foundation (Emirates in the eyes of its artists, 1989) Sharjah International Arts Biennial’s 4th Session (1999) and was one of the artists representing the UAE during Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany (2000) amongst many.

Al Banna’s work is a reflection of his world view. Drawing primarily from elements of design, his canvas is the negative space and his art is life projected against it. His fascination with world-building, borrowed from the field of architecture, gave rise to his hallmark Black and White collages: a diaristic series of abstract paper works using ink and collage which foreground process.In these greyscale mosaics, the artist imposes colour constraints to excavate the endless possibilities of two opposing elements and to execute delicately dynamic drawings that freeze-frame a moment in time. He weaves together vague depictions of his landscape, the past and the present as well as blurry scenes from world affairs as experienced through his status quo. In repeated layers, he rips his paper with his hands, establishing connection with the medium, each time at random angles, then reattaches it to the source, so as to have each cut form a unique shape in endless permutations. This unpretentious haptic process strips the work of its inscribed meaning and turns it into raw matter, reengineered through colour, shape and form.