ART CITIES:Stockholm-Madhat Kakei

Unlike most monochrome painting, Madhat Kakei’s paintings are explosive, laden with meaning, full of joy and sorrow, permeated by a light both ruthless and conciliatory. He uses thick layers of colour that are applied beyond the limit of the canvas, testifying to the process of elaboration and creating a third dimension.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive

Madhat Kakei was born in the south of Irak in Kurdistan in 1954. He studied art in Bagdad and Madrid in the ‘70s and moved to Sweden in the mid ‘80s, and became a Swedish citizen. He paints what the eye cannot see. In “Madhat Kakei’s Abstract Cabinet”, Moderna Museet for the first time presents a large number of his works. He is a painter who has devoted decades to painting layer upon layer of light and shadow, to create a poetic universe that combines Western concepts of monochrome painting with totally different abstract traditions. The paint applied with a knife make it possible to discover the lower layers on the surface, creating both depth and transparency in the work. We are confronted with sculpture-paintings. The idea of non-figurative, abstract images is not a modernist invention, even if it was injected with new meaning by the early 20th-century avant-garde artists. The prohibition against figuration and the notion that it is impossible to depict the almighty are based on much older philosophical and religious ideas. Madhat Kakei is aware of this, along with many of the poets who are drawn to his paintings, which, on closer scrutiny prove not to be monochrome at all, but have a depth that suggests an infinity of colours. Kakei paints what the eye cannot see. He called his exhibition in Amman, the capital of Jordan, in 2013 ”Return to the Sun”. The title evokes associations to a pivotal moment in Russian avant-garde history, the opera “Victory over the Sun”, created exactly one hundred years previously. The stage curtain was adorned with Malevich’s black square, arguably modernism’s most poignant emblem, which here made its apperance for the first time.

Info: Curator: Daniel Birnbaum, Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Duration: 28/11/15-8/2/16, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri 10:00-20:00, Wed-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se