Biography
Wafa Ahmed Mohammed Al Hamad AlSemaitt was a Qatari educator, artist, and designer. She was a prominent artist of her generation who taught art in Doha. Her artworks are distinctive for the metamorphosis of local scenes and figures into abstract geometric and calligraphic forms. Swirling corals in the ocean, optical illusions, and psychedelic-like spiritual colour-grading are a few of the many visual elements that marked her artistic career, lasting over 40 years. Al Hamad was born in Dohan in 1964 to a creative family. Her mother, Shaikha Saad Al Nisef Al Sulaiti, was fond of poetry writing and prose, and her father, Ahmed Al-Hamad, was a tradesman. The family had five children, the eldest being Al Hamad. Her sister, Maryam, is a visual artist and designer, and her brother, Abdullah, is a musician and designer. Her semi-abstract figurative paintings act as a micro-memoir, capturing her life and upbringing in post-oil discovery Qatar and the nation's independence in 1971. One example is Samarah (1990), where Al Hamad's brother takes centre stage in the living room, playing the oud (Middle Eastern lute), surrounded by an abstract depiction of the family dressed in traditional attire.
From an early age, Al Hamad started to document the geometrical elements of her surroundings, first experimenting with Arabic letters' aesthetics in public school lessons. She then received training in drawing, after which she experimented with several mediums to better convey the basics of Islamic art in everyday culture. During secondary studies, her mother encouraged her to take art lessons and enrolled her in Al Marsam Al Hurr (The Free Atelier), established in 1977. Named after the progressive Kuwaiti art studio, Al Marsam Al Hurr is one of the prominent historic art spaces in Doha, from which key artists graduated. Al Hamad participated in the atelier's activities between 1981 and 1985 and was among the first young women to study there. At Al Marsam Al Hurr, an Egyptian artist and educator, Jamal Qutub (1930–2016), taught Al Hamad oil painting. Qutub led the space and espoused traditional practices, concentrating on impressionism to convey local heritage. Later, Al Hamad studied with Mahmoud Bassiouni (1920–1994), focusing on surrealist depictions of traditional landscapes. At the time, Bassiouni was also a professor at Qatar University. His influence could be traced in her early work, such as Untitled (n.d.), a painting depicting a floating city landscape. Bassiouni’s impact is also noticed in other artists of her generation, such as Wafika Sultan al-Essa (b. 1952) and Yousef Ahmed (b. 1955).
A keen student, Al Hamad wanted to deepen her knowledge of Islamic art and ceramics and engaged in artistic experimentation that binds Islamic and Gulf heritage. According to Al Hamad, this experimentation allowed space for stepping into “the future” of image-making and moving towards a globalist art synthesis. She believed that creating abstract calligraphy would reach a wider audience and receive greater appreciation. Her early participation in exhibitions was at the atelier’s first public show in 1983 and local group exhibitions organised by the Qatar Fine Arts Association. In the mid-1980s, she joined the association and participated in the Arab Youth Exhibition in Riyadh in 1983.
Between 1983 and 1986, Al Hamad studied art education at Qatar University. As one of the first two women in the country to graduate from the art department, this turning point inspired many art educators and artists in the subsequent decades. At the time, she and artist Wafika Sultan al-Essa were considered two of the most prominent women artists in modernist Doha. Al-Essa was one of the first Qatari women to study art abroad in 1974 at Cairo's Academy of Applied Arts.
The 1980s marked a significant development of Al Hamad’s artistic career. During this period, her work was characterised by a repetition of circular grids and Arabic letters that introduced different consciousnesses to spirituality. One of her iconic paintings, Khidaa al Basar (Optical Illusion), 1985, borrows from a Qur’anic verse and embodies “oneness” in the form of multitudes, while the gradual light, moving from white to blue in the background, casts a shadow on the vertical lines. Abstraction was not the only approach Al Hamad followed in this period; she also utilised realist and impressionist styles, known as “heritage architecture,” as she named them, or the “Al-Andalusiat” period, which blends Western and Islamic art. She used different approaches to tackle Khaleeji (Gulf) aesthetics. The first was by drawing attention to shadow and line, with close attention to highly detailed ornaments of traditional architecture—mainly of the photographs of doors and windows in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. She painted highly detailed doors and facades of buildings based on her admiration of pictures captured by anonymous photographers who documented old buildings. The second one involved introducing Arabic proverbs (Al Amthal Al Shabiaa) through calligraphy and taking complex shapes in her later work, all to achieve what she called “portals into the Gulf cultures.”
In the following years, her work continued to materialise around geometric abstraction. The color abstraction theories put forth by Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) particularly captivated her. Additionally, she studied the 1960s Op art movement of the Hungarian-French artist Victor Vasarely (1906–1997), which had a lasting impact on her practice. She utilised Islamic geometry and optical illusions to create a distinctive visual language. She left most of her paintings semi-abstract and unnamed to free the spectator from a language tied to meanings. Line, background, shadow, and motifs were all elements that make up her visual lexicon, and she frequently visited them during her study years abroad.
Al Hamad had a state scholarship and, in 1991 ,received a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art
from Eastern Michigan University, specialising in oil painting. She got a Ph.D. in art education from the University of North Texas in 1998. The time in the United States inspired another iconic painting, Qae Al Moheit (the Bottom of the Ocean), from 1990. Qae Al Moheit reimagines life in the depths of the sea, depicting corals, oysters, and spiral animals that Qatari fishermen and pearl divers could not have possibly seen due to harsh conditions. The inspiration came from an image of a vibrant deep ocean on a magazine cover that Al Hamad saw. In 1995, Al Hamad met her future husband, Tareq Al Shaikh, in the United States. After returning home in 2000, Al Hamad taught art at Qatar University. While mentoring and supporting students and organising on-campus exhibitions, she remained committed to nurturing her distinct artistic style.
Al-Hamad’s search for a common visual ground between proverbs and calligraphy continued with a traditional turn, found in some of her lesser-known watercolours and collages. In the 2000s, she hid calligraphic notes in the background of her work, with literal representations of words as objects. For example, the local expression “Maksoora wa Tbarid” (broken but keeps the water cold) encapsulates a state of mind through a painted jar, signifying functionality despite "exhaustion," and both the architecture and landscape in the painting embody these cracks. It merges humour and surrealism with visual and oral heritage. Photography was also incorporated into her black-and-white collage work with Arabic inscriptions, resembling a computer-designed artwork. Public engagement and exhibitions peaked in the 2000s.
In February 2012, at the age of 48, Al Hamad passed away in Heidelberg, Germany, after a battle with cancer. The Painter in the Ocean (2013), a 45-minute documentary about the artist, was released at a celebration at Qatar University as a homage to her. In another tribute to the artist, in 2021, Katara Cultural Village commissioned two murals by Serbian Doha-based artist Dimitrije Bugarski based on al-Hamad’s 1991 painting A Dream on the Seabed.
