Zawyeh Gallery presents ‘Visualizing Palestine: An Intimate Portrait of a Land’, an exhibition of selected works by two of Palestine’s most significant and senior artists, Nabil Anani and Sliman Mansour. Both primarily painters, have played a crucial role in defining modern art in Palestine. Their works are a repository of images of the Palestinian experience, but particularly of the landscape as re- imagined and revisualised through both artists’ intimate knowledge of its stories, history and the contemporary devastations visited upon it. Their timeless images evoke the specific geography of this place while telling us about the occupation that has redesigned its borders and contours. In vibrant colours and with bold, emphatic drawing, both artists render a vivid experience in paint of the specific Palestinian geography with its iconic and ancient olive trees, the traditional stone houses of the villages built into the terraced hillsides, and some of the more modern manifestations of ‘home’: the refugee camps now similarly embedded in the Palestinian topography.

The first exhibition in many years of paintings and works on paper by Elaine and Willem de Kooning will be on view at Heather James Fine Art, New York, from November 8, 2018 – February 28, 2019. de Kooning X de Kooning traces the artists’ early experimentation with abstraction and figuration with paintings and photographs from the Rudy Burckhardt family collection, and includes later works from other private collections to illustrate how their styles evolved. An opening reception will be held at the gallery, 42 East 75 Street, on November 8, 6 – 8 p.m.

Highlights include Willem de Kooning’s Woman II Springs, c. 1961, part of a critical body of work that became known as his “Woman” series. This signature painting will be joined by earlier gouaches from 1937-42 — initiated right before meeting Elaine — and a pair of small-scaled abstract paintings completed in 1958 — soon after the couple separated.

Between rivers is an exhibition of painting and photography by Leila Kubba Kawash and Ihsan Jezany . The show begins on November 7, 2018 until November 28, 2018 at Artspace Hamra.
Sontag’s provocation is at the center, albeit ambivalently, of Leila Kubba Kawash’s and Ihsan Jezany’s different means of bringing attention to the neglected landscape of marshes. Sontag’s statement at once brings together the mediums of painting and photography at work in “Between Rivers,” but Sontag’s careered profiling of artistic persona boxes in the creator in an enlightened frame.

Courtesy of Artspace

Ayyam Gallery Beirut is pleased to announce Opacity and Transparency, a solo exhibition of New York- based artist Samia Halaby presenting her latest works.

Following a 2017 solo-exhibition at Ayyam Gallery Dubai, Halaby has since than added additional works to her series Illuminated Space, highlighting the artist’s latest experiments in the interplay of opacity and transparency within Illuminated Space.

The initial works of the series focus on luminosity accomplished through the relationship of colors. The suggestion of radiating light within her worksdeveloped into an exploration of what she describes as ‘the space of light.’ For Halaby, luminosity in her paintings is learnt from seeing ambiances such as the darkness of night, or evening light in a city, and contract of interior and exterior light.

The series build upon past experiences of seeing the world. New York City and the daily activity of her neighbourhood are where the artist encounters human organization and interprets it using geometric forms. Nature’s complex forms, their surprising combinations also impact her canvas. Motion is a coherent part of her interpretations as she walks down the streets noting the expansion of things as she approaches them and their contraction as she walks away.

Halaby’s latest additions to the series depict a denser, more layered organization. Here she explores how transparency affects the hard edges of shape and how layers can be used to illustrate degrees of density and softness. For this, Halaby adopted a method new to her practice called ‘dry brush’. With works such as Interpenetrating Transparencies,Halaby renders her square and triangular brush marks as a series of overlapping transparent layers to allow the canvases to become more textured and softer.

Mark Hachem Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of relief and sculpture by artist Alfred Basbous (1924 – 2006). A major pioneer of Modernist sculpture in the Middle East, Basbous drew on the influence of Jean Arp, Constantin Brâncuși and Henry Moore to create stone and bronze sculptures of often monumental proportions. The exhibition brings together a series of sculptures from the 1960’s to the 2000’s, which demonstrate Basbous’ exploration of the relationship between form and material. A selection of Basbous’ preparatory drawings which reveal his approach to relief and sculpture are also exhibited.

Courtesy of Mark Hachem Gallery.

The Lighthouse

Dome of the human relationship with heaven, the disk or the half disk reflecting the light of civilization.

A geometric equation to a doctrine, to a beginning, to a universal question… to  universal beauty, to lines: straight, bent or intersecting… crossing over Earth, disturbing trees and their fruits… the soil and the seasons of nature which merge with the fabric of the human imagination that swings and soars with joy, reverence and aspiration.

You are the epitome of those who seek meaning behind words and speech.

You are the color that cannot be abolished, the sound that never interrupts whispering melodies in the bows of the arches of your minarets and churches, in the links of your keystones to history… in the struggle, in the wars of survival, in the search for truth and freedom.

You are Jerusalem, the embodiment of beauty, the divine city of salvation, the immortal righteous torch.

You are the uncompromising land, the rock that can’t be abolished no matter how long wars are waged.

You are Jerusalem, the city of cultures the torch and the lighthouse of freedom.

You are the manifestation of our traditions, the inspiration to our art and poetry. You are the bearer of our conscience and speech. You are our ultimate prayer.

You are the holiest of the holy, the cross of sacrifice, the church of resurrection ever standing, the way of the cross. You are the persistent and continual sparkle of humanity looking for peace on the altar of forgotten justice.

You are our Jerusalem. To you our humble prayers go every day.

Jamil Molaeb
2018

Courtesy of Galerie Janine Rubeiz

NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery presents Ways of Seeing, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, founders of the multi-disciplinary curatorial platform Art Reoriented, Chairmen of the Montblanc Cultural Foundation, and Affiliate Curators at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The exhibition brings together 26 artists through 41 works spanning a variety of media from painting, sculpture and photography to sound, film and installation. It first opened at ARTER – Space for Art in Istanbul and was later adapted for the Boghossian Foundation – Villa Empain in Brussels.

The exhibition includes a number of seminal works that relate, in various ways, to Berger’s multilayered argument. By inviting the viewer to take a second look, upon which the contours of a new reality begin to emerge, they reflect Berger’s call for the viewer to be actively engaged in the act of seeing. A 1968 projection piece by James Turrell, a 1992 vertical construction installation by Fred Sandback, along with a 1966 mirror installation by Michelangelo Pistoletto all blur the boundaries between the artwork and the space in which it is displayed. Video pioneers Paul and Marlene Kos’s 1976 Lightning video, two of Gustav Metzger’s 1996 “Historic Photographs,” and two photographic prints by Lateefa bint Maktoum from 2011 and 2014 respectively, play on the tension between presence and absence, providing the viewer with new ways of accessing the artwork and its corresponding subject matter. Works by Salvador Dali, Alicja Kwade, or Hassan Sharif and Andreas Gursky change our perception of familiar objects by altering their function, display context or physical appearance, making us ponder the way in which narratives are constructed through what we see.

Ways of Seeing will be accompanied by a full program of public events, including talks, workshops, and family-friendly activities.