Biography
Mattar Bin Lahej, born in Dubai in 1968, is one of the Emirates' most recognisable living artists — a self-taught painter, sculptor, photographer and calligrapher who has spent nearly four decades pulling Arabic script off the page and into three dimensions. His instinct has always run toward art in public space rather than the gallery wall: monumental sculpture, light, steel, and a calligraphy he treats as form and movement as much as language. He founded Marsam Mattar, the first artist-run gallery in the UAE, and developed his own contemporary letterform, the "Mattar Font", which loosens classical Arabic letters toward abstraction. His work has shown in the UK, the US and across the Gulf. He is most widely known for the 14 kilometres of thuluth calligraphy wrapping the Museum of the Future — a commission he describes as the moment his whole career had been building toward. He chose thuluth deliberately, for what he calls its majesty: a script that, in his words, instils awe even in those who cannot read it. The result earned the building its nickname, "the only building that speaks Arabic". For Bin Lahej the project sits exactly on the line his practice has always walked — heritage carried forward rather than embalmed — and, as he puts it, he reached an international stage without ever leaving home.