Shaikh Rashid bin Khalifa Al Khalifa (born 1952) is a member of the Bahraini royal family, an artist and the chairman of Bahrain's National Council for Arts. He is the first president and the current honorary president of the Bahrain Arts Society. He has painted over a period of 50 years, beginning with landscape painting in the late 1960s. His recent work continues to explore his immediate landscape and the traditional architecture of his homeland, through wall based, structural installations created with aluminium. He is widely considered one of the Kingdom's most renowned artists.
Biography
Rashid Al Khalifa was born in Riffa in 1952. He is the second son of Shaikh Khalifa bin Hamad Al Khalifa, who was the eighth son of Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, the ruler of Bahrain from 1932 until his death in 1942. Rashid was exposed to literature, philosophy and music in high school and his interest in painting was encouraged by the late Emir, Shaikh Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa as well as Shaikh Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, the late Prime Minister of Bahrain (1970-2020), both of whom showed genuine interest in Rashid's work when he participated in a local art exhibition at his high school.
Rashid held his first solo exhibition at the Dilmun Hotel, Bahrain, in 1970 when he was just 18 years old, and then moved to the UK in 1972 to study at the Hastings College of Arts and Technology in Sussex. After returning to Bahrain in 1978, inspired by Europe's greatest Impressionist masters, he began his own renditions of his country's landscapes, producing a series of atmospheric paintings of the desert, sea, and historical sites. These works were first presented at the Middle East Institute, Washington, D.C., USA, and at the Sheraton Hotel, Bahrain, in 1982. Rashid developed his painting by responding to certain movements and styles such as geometric abstraction, hard-edge painting and colour field work. In 1983, Rashid and a number of other Bahraini artists, formed the Bahrain Arts Society, a non-profit organization for Bahraini artists, whereby Rashid was named its first president. He continues to hold the title of honorary president.
The artist's vital decision to merge elements of his figurative and landscape works in the late 1980s was an entirely conscious one. He was driven by a greater sense of individuality, which emulated the ambiance and aura of his own surroundings. His female figures became barely decipherable, as hints of fabric, suggestions of limbs and movement, and cascades of hair all dispersed into the melding colours of the land. Rashid's further transformation of his work in the early 1990s denotes his desire to contain and redirect his previously gestural and fleeting. mark making. Gradually becoming more controlled, his imagery began incorporating more decorative elements. This series of works were first presented in 1996 in solo exhibitions at the De Caliet Gallery in Milan, Italy, and the El Kato Kayyel Gallery, Milan, Italy, as well as at the Shuman Arts Organisation in Jordan in 1997. During this time, Rashid also experimented with a shapelier backdrop, forming a triangular prism with three canvases. And while he appreciated its three-dimensionality, which allowed the work to stand unsupported so viewers could look from all angles, he was unsatisfied with the result.
Further investigations and an unintentional discovery resulted in his characteristically ‘convex canvas’ which emerged towards the end of the 1990s. Beginning in 2000, this new canvas became the mainstay on which the artist merged all his imagery - landscape, figurative and abstract expressionism - into his own colour field language. From 2006 onwards, along with his continued application of bright and vivid colour schemes, his practice adopted a conceptual framework. Organic shapes and unusual patterns swirled together, allowing for the emergence of animate and abstract imagery.