Strauss & co - 16 February 2019, Cape Town

29 15 Thameur Mejri TUNISIA 1982– Two Figures at War 2016 charcoal, pencil, pastel and acrylic on canvas 197,5 by 178 cm R180 000 – 240 000 PROVENANCE Purchased from the Jack Bell Gallery by the current owner. EXHIBITED Jack Bell Gallery, London, Before You Split the Ground, 7 to 21 April 2017. ITEM NOTES Thameur Mejri’s work can be located within the geopolitical context of his native Tunisia which, by the time he was twenty years old, was rocked by the so-called ‘war on terror’ that occurred with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. 1 Less than a decade later, Mejri found himself confronted with the effects of the Arab Spring that gave rise to a wave of Islamic extremism across the region. Such conceptual traces of violence and aggression are not far away in Mejri’s paintings which aim to ‘cap- ture the chaos of the breakdown of human order’. 2 Yet whilst the body remains central to Mejri’s representational concerns, his nuance lies in the way that abstraction is used to communicate the pressures that lead to a fractured sense of being in contemporary Tunisian society. In so doing his can- vases become ‘the space where the physical and psychological dimen- sions of that conflict is projected’. 3 1. Katrina Kufer. (2018) Tunisian Artist Thameur Mejri’s Inevitable Journey [Online] Available: https://www.harpersbazaararabia . com/art/artists/meet-tunisian-artist-thameur- mejri [9 December 2018]. 2. Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi. (2017) ‘Invitation into the Depiction of Violence’, in Thameur Mejri, Heretic Spaces , Dubai: Elmarsa Gallery. Page 7. 3. Thameur Mejri. (2017) Heretic Spaces , Dubai: Elmarsa Gallery. Page 29.