Nottingham Contemporary

Nottingham Contemporary presents the second-ever institutional exhibition of Algerian- German artist Hamid Zénati (b.1944, Algeria; d.2022, Germany) following his solo debut at Haus der Kunst, Munich. Celebrating Zénati's nearly sixty-year career, this major survey casts him as an inventive, free thinker and artist of his time. A self-taught artist whose job as a translator brought him to Germany in the mid-1960s, Zénati worked compulsively across surfaces and disciplines from textiles, fashion and ceramics to wearable sculpture and photography, using his 'all-over' signature style. His inexhaustible wealth of forms, patterns and combinations of colour, material and technique created an abstract visual language entirely his own. His textile paintings freely blend North African modernism, Japanese textile design, Sahrawi patterns, the set designs of Sonia Delaunay, and organic forms found in nature.