“The voice of the artist is louder than before, and although there are people who remain suspicious of artists and what they do, the voice of art itself will always be loudest. When we die, it’s our art that survives us.”
Abdulaziz Ashour was born in1962 in the traditional part of Jeddah. Like most Saudi artists, he has combined his career as an artist with a steady job, and for the past 25 years has been an employee at the Ministry of Energy. This has had a considerable effect on his artistic production and accounts for the preponderance of circuit boards, wires and CDs within the plane of his canvases. By 2009 Ashour plans to be working as a full-time artist for the first time.
Soft White takes white as its dominant compositional force. Ashour refers to this colour as his bride and treats it with delicacy. Elsewhere in the work you can see his interest in invisible lines of technological communication, their diagrammatic representation and the tension he perceived in the region following the 1st Gulf War.
