British-Iraqi Athier (1982) has lived between London and Paris, after having left Iraq before the first Gulf War. He graduated with a Master of Arts in Communication Design with Illustration from Central Saint Martins. From 2007-9 Athier was the British Museum’s Artist in Residence, in association with the Karim Rida Said Foundation, teaching Arab world cultural awareness at selected UK schools. This was centered around engaging British students with the Arab world by breaking down aesthetic elements and creating new associations and references. During this period, he also collaborated on mural workshops for the Victoria & Albert Museum, focusing much of this work on similar Arab world constructs. In 2010, Athier was given an artist residency by the Chargé de Collection et d'Exposition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris as part of Al Mansouria Foundation’s Arab Artist Program. The UK’s National Portrait Gallery selected Athier for the 2011 “Changing Mirrors” initiative. The artist worked with children from underprivileged communities and his monumental abstract portrait of the children went on display on October 14, 2011. Athier's work was part of the 2011 Tashkent International Biennale in Uzbekistan.
Each canvas can be potentially seen as one block, phrase, sentence, or idea, as well as an assembly of these parts. Only once the viewer has experienced the work as whole, does the eye begin to discern details and individual elements. The presence of words in Athier’s paintings is not immediately apparent; the embedded script becomes pronounced to the viewer only after the context is taken in. This use of visual language as subtext adds dimension to his work, and allows the preconception of imagery and meaning that the powerful Arabic language conveys to become at once distinct from, yet an integral part of, the work as a whole. The viewer is thus drawn into the work in a non-traditional manner in which the significance of the letter-forms is made apparent only by the context, as if reading a text.
Athier’s words and letters are truncated by line, color and aesthetic distortion. The result is neither the stylized script of traditional scribes nor the entwined graffiti-like productions of contemporary masters, rather a technique that is novel in its visual appeal.
