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Katara Art Studios is Happy to announce a public Graffiti Art workshop with Artist Vincent Abadie Hafez. Vincent will be an artist in residence at the Katara Art Studios from the 5th of July to the 11th of July, working on a personal exhibition at Katara Galleries entitled “99 Names of Allah”. Vincent will be offering a workshop on Graffiti Art for all artists based in Qatar interested in this art form. The artist will paint a 9 Meters Mural and will supervise the workshop participants while helping him producing this wall. The Workshop attendants will have also the opportunity to collaboratively produce another Graffiti Wall under the supervision of Vincent.  Both Murals will be in exhibition at Katara Throughout Ramadan. We welcome Graffiti Art lovers to register and participate in this exciting public art project. Workshop Location: Katara Art Studios, Katara Building 19 Workshop Dates: From 6th July to 11th July Workshop Timings: 5 PM to 9 PM (Before Ramdan) 8 PM to 11 PM (During Ramadan) Workshop Price: FREE   Vincent Abadie Hafez web site:  http://www.abadiafez.com/   To Register please send your name and phone number by email to: education@katara.net Or call our Katara Education team on 44080233 – 44080235       Katara Gallery Building 19, Gallery 1   Exhibition and Public Art Graffiti Mural Opening on the 11th July   “99 Names of Allah” by Vincent Abadie Hafez   This exhibition by respected French Graffiti artist Vincent Abadie Hafez, will feature 99 silk screen paintings representing the 99 names of Allah, and 8 large scale paintings.  The artist will also produce a public art graffiti wall with over 5 meters long. Alongside the wall the artist will produce, there will be an expression wall where the public can also tryout their graffiti art skills. Cosmopolitan, the work of Vincent Abadie Hafez is the result of interbreeding, the confluence of several cultures. His work blends into Katara’s mission of building bridges between cultures, as it is an excellent embodiment of our mission to bring people together into common ground through sharing art and cultural enjoyment.   In 1989, under the pseudonym “Zepha”, the artist enters the graffiti movement, in a suburb of Paris where he began to impose his name and that of his team the “GAP”, since then his artistic practice has developed and received great accolades around the world.   Vincent appropriates public space and disrupts visual habits, he sees himself as a graphic utopian undertaking a fight against a system guided by a man eating wild liberalism, and his « enfant terrible »: The Advertising World, sparking rampant and meaningless consumerism.   In parallel to his street writing work, Vincent Abadie Hafez developed a graphic and visual language based on movement, through which intersect the influence of the craftsmanship of ancient civilizations, calligraphy, the immediacy of the movement, the spontaneity of the Lyrical Abstraction, and finally, the taking risks in random graffiti work.   Arabic calligraphy strongly influences his work through his meeting with the Moroccan calligraphist Abdelatif Mustad, and the discovery of the Sudanese artist Ahmed Abdel Aal’s work. Using the Kufic and lively Diwani styles, he developed in his artistic practice a balance between letters and gestures, greatly resulting in its outstanding and aesthetically pleasing graffiti works, with its message of tolerance and human cultural cooperative engagement.   Departing from a singular graphic vocabulary form, and informed research, Vincent’s work depicts a balance of instinctive lines and thoughtful compositions. The letter, be it Latin or Arabic, is distorted, diverted, connected, mixed, accumulated, and transforms into dreamlike and labyrinthine calligraphic artworks.