A Very Important Person (VIP) is a person who is accorded special privileges due to his or her status or importance. The special treatment usually involves separation from common people, and a higher level of comfort.

Artists

Sir Peter Blake is perhaps the most recognized and highly regarded artist of the British Pop Art movement. Much of his output – such as the sleeve for The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ – has achieved iconic status.

Blake’s work reflects his fascination with all streams of popular culture, and the beauty to be found in everyday objects and surroundings. Many of his works feature found printed materials such as photographs, comic strips or advertising texts, combined with bold geometric patterns and the use of primary colours.

The works perfectly capture the effervescent and optimistic ethos of the sixties, but are also strikingly fresh and contemporary. There is also a strain of sentimentality and nostalgia running throughout his work, with particular focus towards childhood innocence and reminiscence, as can be seen clearly in his recent Alphabet series. Blake is renowned for his connection with the music industry, having produced iconic album covers for the Beatles, Paul Weller, The Who, and Oasis.

Damien Hirst Undoubtedly the most acclaimed contemporary artist of his generation. Genuine star of the YBA (Young British Artists) movement, Hirst has always made a point of mixing up his genres. Artist, entrepreneur and celebrity, he has produced much of the most spectacular works in recent years and helped to revolutionize the art market.

From Freeze, the artist’s first exhibition which he organized while still at Goldsmith’s College in 1988, to the prestigious Turner Prize awarded to him in 1995, from the diamondencrusted skull (For the Love of God, 2008) to the controversial sale of his work at Sotheby’s in the same year, Damien Hirst always seeks to subvert the system and thereby create some truly emblematic pieces of art.

Inspired by such diverse themes as life, death, art, science and medicine Damien Hirst makes use of many varied techniques including installation, sculpture, painting, drawing, etching and silkscreen.

Noorah Kareem born 1990 graduated with a diploma from the Arts & Skills Institute, Riyadh in 2009. In 2012 Kareem pursued a degree in the field of special Education- Behavioural Disorder & Autism, Riyadh. Alumni of the Crossway Foundation Create & Inspire competition 2011. Kareems work had been featured in Design Magazine, Ayadi Magazine, Al Riyadh newspaper and Al Hayat Newspaper and held in private collections in Saudi Arabia, the United States and Australia.

Alex Katz is the outstanding protagonist of figurative Painting, and one of the most influential painters in the world. Alex Katz was often said to be one of the father of the Pop Art movement, but his style was always independent on the borderline between abstraction and realism. His paintings are the result of a transformation of the three-dimensional word in simplified landscapes and portraits of sophisticated woman on canvas. Katz is well known for featuring his own social milieu often depicting parties, portraits of friends and fellow artists, and most notably, his wife Ada. Katz also worked with collage, printmaking, and set design, increasingly concentrating on these mediums and developing freestanding sculptural cut outs. He later painted large-scale landscapes and continues to work with natural themes in form of large scale flower scenes in his works today.

Jeff Koons playfully tests the boundaries of commerce, celebrity, banality and pleasure. He turns banal commercial or everyday objects into art icons by using seductive materials, a shift of scale and a contextual displacement. Koons’ largescale vinyl “Inflatables”, his enormous chromium stainless steel “Balloon Dog” or the giant “Puppy” and “Split Rocker” made of hundreds of flowers all follow this principle.

Originally licensed as a commodities broker, in the late 1970ies Koons decided to become and artist and moved from Wall Street into a factory-like studio in SoHo with hundreds of assistants. Since then, he has produced different series like the Pre-New, a series of domestic objects in strange new configurations, The Equilibrium Series, consisting of basketballs floating in distilled water tanks, or the Banality Series culminating with a sculpture of Michael Jackson and his chimpanzee Bubbles.

Koons is widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, and controversial contemporary artists. He constantly tests the boundaries between art and commerce, high culture and mass culture, readymade and art object, by decontextualizing his objects and lifting them to iconic statuses. He has lifted art out of the enclave of the geniusdriven artist into the realms of nowadays pop and commerce driven culture.

Mohammed Shammarey is a self-taught artist; he works with painting, photography, silk-screen printing and sculpture. He has held many solo exhibitions including shows held at his atelier in Baghdad (in 1988, 1991 and 1999); FA Gallery, Kuwait, 2010, and Word, Object, Motion (with Simeen Farhat), Anya Tish Gallery, Houston, Texas, in 2010. He has also participated in group exhibitions such as Word into Art, British Museum, London, 2006; Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art, University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, travelling exhibition, 2005– 2008; Iraqi Artists in Exile, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, Texas, 2008; and Modernism and Iraq, Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 2009. 2013 - an Exhibition of Works by Mohammed Al Shammarey ARTSPACE Dubai. 2012 Anya Tish Gallery Houston Tx Collective Reaction: FotoFest 2014 work is often inspired by literature and poetry, particularly the writings of Rumi, Mahmoud Darwish and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Since 2008, he has lived and worked in Houston, Texas.