Yaser Dweik was born in Hebron in 1940. He has extensive experience in drawing, painting, crafts, etching and printmaking, ceramics and enameling. He studied Fine Arts in Baghdad and Graphic Arts in Britain and worked teaching in schools, colleges and universities. He has also worked in the field of educational supervision in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates and also worked in preparing and presenting TV programs. He has critical writings in technical fields, newspapers and books in the field of Art Education. Dweik has held sixteen solo exhibitions inside Jordan and abroad, and participated in more than thirty exhibitions regionally and internationally, winning Arab and international prizes. He is a member of a number of federations and associations of art in the Arab world and internationally and was the President of the Association of Fine Artists in Jordan for five years.
Yaser Dweik
Get to know the artist
YASER DWEIK 50 YEARS OF GRAPHICS
Showing 50 Years of Yaser Dweik’s extraordinary original prints and works on paper covering traditional imagery through to contemporary calligraphy compositions. It’s a lifetime of work from one of Jordan’s pioneer artists.
Jordanian artist Yaser Dweik was born in Palestine in 1940. He received his formal arts education at the Fine Art Academy in Baghdad in 1968, following this with printmaking at Brighton Polytechnic in the UK in 1972.
Returning to Jordan in the 1970s, Yaser, along with his contemporaries and great friends Mahmoud Taha, Nasr Abdel Aziz, Aziz Ammoura, Keram Al Nimri and Abdel Raouf Shamoun developed their various areas of expertise, crossing over disciplines and often collaborating together on works.
They were amongst the first Jordanian artists to have studied abroad and all returned to be involved in education of the arts and advance their own practices. Yaser has been a dedicated teacher and mentor to students since this time.
The subjects covered in Dweik’s prints encompass matters close to his heart. The elegant and delicate prints of birds and animals completed in the 1970s through to his more recent landscapes show the peaceful and hopeful side of Dweik.
Of course, this had been confronted with the despair and realities of the occupation of his homeland, the places of his heritage and the suffering of his Palestinian people. This work reveals the devastation of the physical environment as well as the pain and despair of the emotional state of the people.
Despite majoring in painting, his printmaking skills evolved to introduce various technical methods and styles to his contemporary work often using several techniques in the one print. The results show deft layers of colour, texture and patterns to tell the story.
CIRCLE MANIFESTATION
The circle in Dweik’s prints is associated with a wide range of symbolic meanings and aesthetic aspects. It is widely interpreted as a symbol of wholeness and unity, with its spherical form representing completeness, completion, and unity.