Jassim al Zaini, Features of Qatar, 1973, Oil on cardboard, 48.5 x 78 cm.

The artist, Jassim Al Zaini, was a pioneer in Qatar’s art scene. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Art in Baghdad in 1968, and was one of the first Qatari artists to travel abroad for academic art training. Much of his work documented the social and economical changes in Qatar during the 1950s and 60s. Zaini’s work is a reflection of a significant era in the history of Qatar as his art captures the changes brought by the exploitation of oil and the formation of a nation state from the 1950s to the 1970s, a period that witnessed rapid social, cultural and economic transformation, which Zaini attempts to document and respond to in his images. This painting tells a story of a boy whose button fell off and his friend’s sister offered to sew back on. The work uses thick layers of paint on a board, the textures developed in a way that evokes that of walls in traditional gulf architecture. In Features from Qatar, Zaini depicts two stylized figures — a boy and a girl — wearing traditional dress. The young man is reclined, and his body extends horizontally from the one side of the painting to the other where his knees bend, forming a pyramidal hump, as if it were the hump of a camel. In the center of the painting, the girl, dressed in a dark ornamental headdress, pulls back his light-colored thobe with a button — an actual button, glued to the board — in her hand, and a threaded needle, poised above the man’s abdomen, in the other. Even with the figures’ physical proximity, their gazes do not meet. The young man’s face is averted in an expression of shyness or fear. In Features from Qatar, Zaini examines the connection between a male and a female figure wearing traditional Qatari clothes, signifying a traditional conservative society pertaining to certain customs and values, such as the taboo of mixing with opposite genders. It is a poignant reflection on social relationships and affection painted during a time before the significant social and economic change Qatar underwent during the 1950s and 1960s after the discovery of oil.