Monday, February 14, 2011

Art, Right on my Doorstep

I've mentioned before just how much I love living in Downtown, so I won't bore you with some of the reasons why, again.  Today I was reminded why, again.  When I first moved in three years ago there were huge piles of what looked like rubble lying at the sides of the roads.  They weren't rubble, they were scultures, lying in disjointed pieces.  Slowly but surely they started being pieced together and placed along the beautiful Boulevard.

A couple of days ago we spotted something new, covered in tarpaulin.  We mused as to what it might be, and had almost decided on a camel (it had what looked like two humps, ok!).  This morning on my stroll to work there were red velvet ropes cordoning off the area in front of them- a very Dubai thing to do - you're hardly likely to need to hold back a crown of thousands in this situation - so we knew thats something was happening, and soon.

Luckily for my nosy parker tendencies we could see the event unfolding from my office window, and J happily provided the office with regular updates. "People are arriving! People are taking photos! People are taking off the tarpaulin!"  It was hard to tell exactly what the sculptures were from a distace, but a quick look on the internet revealed them to be:

'Together' by Syrian artist Lutfi Romhein features two sculptures – that of an Arab man and an Arab woman, chiselled to perfection. Clad in a flowing white dish-dasha, the male figure has been sculpted in Carrara marble from Italy, while the kandoora-clad female sculpture is made of black granite from Sweden. 

They're absolutely beautiful and I can't wait to have a proper gander at them on the way home from work.  Who says Dubai is a soul-less cultural desert?!

1 comment:

Mrs Dubai said...

What a lovely sculpture!