Hamid Zenati, Two Steps at a Time, 2024

Location Nottingham

Client Nottingham Contemporary

Curators Salma Tuqan, Katie Simpson, Niall Farrelly

Nottingham Contemporary presents the first UK retrospective exhibition celebrating the nearly sixty-year career of Hamid Zénati. This major survey casts him as an inventive, free thinker and artist of his time.

Hamid Zénati is a self-taught artist whose job as a translator brought him from Algeria to Germany in the mid-1960s. His dual identity is expressed in the work, freely blending Sahrawi patterns, North African modernism, Japanese textile design, the set designs of Sonia Delaunay, and organic forms found in nature.

Zénati’s childhood in Algiers, amid diverse languages, cultures, and architecture during the fight for Algerian independence, deeply influenced his work. Moving to Munich in the mid-1960s, he began drawing and painting while working as a translator. His inspirations were vast, encompassing travels, music, literature, Amazigh motifs and Sahrawi garments. His inexhaustible wealth of forms, patterns and combinations of colour, material and technique created an abstract visual language entirely his own.

The exhibition design reflected Zénati’s North African and Arab heritage, as well as his German identity by creating a display strategy that reflected this hybridity. The displays showcases Zénati’s creativity through hanging textile paintings and ceramic objects as well as personal photographs, books, music, and archival materials that provide socio-political and cultural context.

Hamid's artworks are frequently vibrant, intricate, and graphic. To highlight these qualities, we designed plinths of varying heights, enabling the details of each piece to be fully appreciated. Our approach to the exhibition design was significantly influenced by Hannsjörg Voth’s City of Orion series, located in the North African desert. This work engages deeply with themes of cosmology, ancient mythology, cultural histories, and personal symbolism, all of which resonated with the narrative we sought to convey. Photos by Matthew Blunderfield.