Mark Hachem Gallery – Beirut is delighted to present “Multiverses”, a solo exhibition by artist Bassam Kyrillos, featuring a selection of his most recent sculptures.

His recent works explore the narratives of place through cycles of destruction and regeneration. Inhabiting the border zones between devastation and renewal, Bassam Kyrillos creates sculptures of an alternate urbanity; a place bearing witness to its history and simultaneously regenerating itself. These structures bear the marks of conflict and also burst with organic potential, searching or strategies of survival that are essential to the continuation of life.

In the world of “multiverses” we look for the inevitability of existence and we ask about the realness of the place. A scientific study states that the substance that makes up everything does not really exist, but we live in a space of holograms composed according to the ideas of each individual.
We know that the universe in which we live started with the “Big Bang”, which resulted in space and time and after which came nature and life that are violent in their nature. So according to Kyrillos, instead of determinism in a world of multiverses ruled by violence, reality derives its existence from ideas, information and consciousness.

In his sculptures, the place takes the form of the building, where the forms accumulate horizontals and verticals in a combination that simulates war, violence, destruction and death, but in parallel all of the visual elements reflect the resurrection, the hope and the peace. In the midst of this dualism, the face of human reflects the miracle of life, the secret of consciousness and the force of the mind.

Courtesy of Mark Hachem Gallery

In “Freedom Fighters”, Jabre Jureidini questions the Burqa and the Hijab without the need to confine women into categories, whether their choice falls in line with hers or is drastically different from it. She investigates the Burqa as a symbolic and graphic representation of a façade. She experiments with this shield by taking a walk in these women’s shoes and questions whether religious signs have risen exponentially to fill the empty gaps in people’s confused identities. She questions whether false interpretations and prejudice against Islamic doctrines have been highly manipulated through the Burqa as a visual choice. Her artworks highlight possible repercussions of these manipulations that dominate our current political and social arena.

Her perspective stems from curiosity, not judgement, a desire, not sympathy, which allows for a more nuanced approach to this complex phenomenon. Let us save our sympathy to women who have no access to education and health care, to women who are forced to follow a certain protocol in dressing their own bodies. Pity and sympathy are not to be felt for a woman whose rationality led her to dress her body the way she pleases; fully covered or fully erotic is irrelevant.

It is time for us to realize that modernity and liberation do not follow a trajectory that is strictly confined to the amount of flesh we decide to manifest. A veracious modernity understands that liberation encompasses all choices regardless of our understanding of the reason behind those choices.
This exhibition is a reminder to all of us that the only fair label to a woman is “woman”.

Courtesy of Galerie Janine Rubeiz

Zimoun constructs extraordinary, immersive sensory experiences using lo-fi technology, such as analogue motors connected to various functional objects, including wooden sticks, cardboard boxes, and tin foil. He creates chaos from underlying systems of order, exploring elements of biology, engineering, music, sound, and installation art. These minimalist, mechanized sculptures confront the viewer/listener with a unique and compelling visual soundscape, one that simultaneously evokes the urban experience while eliciting almost physical memories of natural sounds (rain, sandstorms, or wind).

Curated by Maya Allison, Chief Curator at NYU Abu Dhabi, this landmark survey will mark the first time the artist has exhibited his work in the Gulf. The show will include a major new commission: an expansive, room-sized installation that will be unveiled on the opening night. The exhibition will also activate the Gallery’s Reading Room with multi-channel compositions from a record label project that Zimoun co-founded, Leerraum, (translated meaning ‘empty space’) which produces experimental music projects on CD, DVD, print, and sound objects, with nearly 100 works from 50 international artists and designers, illustrating once more the immersive nature of Zimoun’s work.

Courtesy of NYU Abu Dhabi

Lyons Wier Gallery is pleased to present “Courting Incoherence” by Joshua Meyer.

The human figures living within Joshua Meyer’s canvases are beautifully unresolved. Thick layers of paint work to articulate fleeting forms, flirting with realism, but ultimately approaching and confronting the limits of our knowledge.

“As I paint, I try to find my way by plunging deeply and directly into the paintings,” Meyer explains. “I revel in the paint and the chaos and I tend to get lost. The only way out is to invent and explore.”

Meyer’s constant making and remaking of the real is undergirded by his remarkable ability to implicate the viewer in the creative process. As each composition’s single, central figure dematerializes from a dense nest of brushstrokes into a pictorial space on the edge of abstraction, the audience is invited to play an active role in reconstructing the progressively open images. But at the heart of each canvas there is also a vulnerability. This gentle silence is the artist’s acknowledgement that our desire to understand those around us can never be fully consummated, that the best we can hope for are halting, humble steps towards genuine comprehension.

“Truth is fragile. I leave my paintings open and a bit unstable because they are actively grappling with the world around them,” Meyer explains, alluding to the tenuousness of knowledge and the swiftness with which our understandings about the world, others, and ourselves can dissipate. “I prefer the absurdity of painting to the absurdity of not painting,” concludes the artist.

“Looking at a Meyer painting means changing your mind about what you see,” according to novelist Allegra Goodman. “Only gradually do I discern the figures in his work. They emerge slowly, rewarding a second and third glance. Coming into their own, they transform the color all around them. As living people do, Meyer’s subjects will reveal themselves, and they will disappear. Look at them up close and they scatter, self-effacing. Back away and they gather force and gravity. Back away a little more. Give Meyer’s figures space, and they’ll possess the room.”

Courtesy of Lyons Wier Gallery

Lyons Wier Gallery is pleased to present “Courting Incoherence” by Joshua Meyer.

The human figures living within Joshua Meyer’s canvases are beautifully unresolved. Thick layers of paint work to articulate fleeting forms, flirting with realism, but ultimately approaching and confronting the limits of our knowledge.

“As I paint, I try to find my way by plunging deeply and directly into the paintings,” Meyer explains. “I revel in the paint and the chaos and I tend to get lost. The only way out is to invent and explore.”

Meyer’s constant making and remaking of the real is undergirded by his remarkable ability to implicate the viewer in the creative process. As each composition’s single, central figure dematerializes from a dense nest of brushstrokes into a pictorial space on the edge of abstraction, the audience is invited to play an active role in reconstructing the progressively open images. But at the heart of each canvas there is also a vulnerability. This gentle silence is the artist’s acknowledgement that our desire to understand those around us can never be fully consummated, that the best we can hope for are halting, humble steps towards genuine comprehension.

“Truth is fragile. I leave my paintings open and a bit unstable because they are actively grappling with the world around them,” Meyer explains, alluding to the tenuousness of knowledge and the swiftness with which our understandings about the world, others, and ourselves can dissipate. “I prefer the absurdity of painting to the absurdity of not painting,” concludes the artist.

“Looking at a Meyer painting means changing your mind about what you see,” according to novelist Allegra Goodman. “Only gradually do I discern the figures in his work. They emerge slowly, rewarding a second and third glance. Coming into their own, they transform the color all around them. As living people do, Meyer’s subjects will reveal themselves, and they will disappear. Look at them up close and they scatter, self-effacing. Back away and they gather force and gravity. Back away a little more. Give Meyer’s figures space, and they’ll possess the room.”

Courtesy of Lyons Wier Gallery

Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present “If stone could give”, an exhibition of new photographic works by Yamini Nayar, marking her first solo exhibition with the gallery and her West Coast solo debut.

“If stone could give” explores the fundamental intersection of sculpture and photography in Nayar’s artistic practice. Bearing strong reference to both Modernist architectural structures, informal building strategies and corporeal forms, the works invite viewers into distinctly psychological environments. Nayar’s compositions draw visually on the relationships between architecture and the body, and the cultural, emotional and spatial resonance of our constructed surroundings. Like the exhibition’s title, “If stone could give”, the works on view blur the boundary between animate gestures and inanimate constructs.

The exhibition presents large and medium-scale photographs mounted on Dibond and frameless, leaning or hanging on supports within the environment. The presentation invites the viewer into a space of process and further blurs the lines between object and image.

“If stone could give” is Gallery Wendi Norris’ fifth offsite exhibition and is presented at 3344 24th Street in San Francisco. Built in 1924, the building boasts classic San Francisco architectural elements, including a small un-finished basement characterized by low ceilings and exposed framework. Like Nayar’s artworks, the space boasts juxtaposing characteristics of refined and raw, light-filled and cavernous, new and old. At the heart of the Mission District, the exhibition is adjacent nearby cultural institutions including the The 500 Capp Street Foundation, Kadist Foundation, Galería de la Raza, The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, The Women’s Building, Ratio 3 Gallery, Et Al. Gallery, and more.

Courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to announce our first exhibition with New York painter David Byrd, and our representation of the David Byrd Estate. We will introduce Byrd’s work with a selection of portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings ranging from 1952 – 2009.

Byrd’s style bears influence from different art historical periods: from European Post-Impressionism (ie: Seurat), to Modernism (ie: Balthus and his brother Pierre Klossowski), and Cubism (ie: his teacher Amédée Ozenfant), to American Realism (ie: George Tooker and Ben Shahn), and Regionalism (ie: Andrew Wythe). Byrd injects realistic portrayal with fantasy, creating an unsettling psychology to the otherwise tranquil compositions. His paintings have a distinct quality of light, and a harmonious palette of muted greens, yellows, greys, and browns, applied with thinned oil paint using a dry brush technique. His prodigious output demonstrates his understanding of human emotion, his isolation, and a lifetime spent carefully looking.

Courtesy of Anton Kern Gallery

Join Grégoire Devin in New York for his Solo Show at Gallery Max Soho.

Grégoire Devin, French artist, brilliantly evokes mental, urban ideas through his paintings, sculptures and painted ceramics. While using street art as a base, Grégoire Devin integrates concepts and styles that draw from the early facets of childhood art, his travels, and his interactions with street culture. His innovative experimentation with art and drawing, began at a very young age. Today, Devin is a prolific artist showing his works around the world, in places like NYC, Miami, Tokyo and Beijing in China. His paintings are filled with doodles of figuration and abstraction. In this regard, Grégoire Devin’s work focuses on making social commentaries through this intersection of graffiti and street art with other styles of more formal painting. His artworks seem to represent facets of a personal narrative; there is something diaristic about them as if the phrases he employs had been ripped from pages of his own journal.

The Sursock Museum is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Laure et Mazen : Correspondance(s), an exhibition of works by Laure Ghorayeb and Mazen Kerbaj.

The exhibition will open on Thursday 31 January 2019 from 18:00 to 21:00.
It will be on view until 26 August 2019.

Laure Ghorayeb is a poet, artist, and art critic. Mazen Kerbaj is an artist, illustrator, and musician. Together, they form one of the most touching artist duos. Their mediums of choice are technical pens, India ink, and paper. Sheets, sketchbooks, scraps, and rolls: paper in all its forms falls prey to the two accomplices.

Laure, the mother, is now 88 years old and at 44, her son Mazen is exactly half her age. Since 2006, and in parallel to their individual practice, they have developed a four-handed practice and unique style, where the minutiae of Laure’s strokes merge with Mazen’s big-nosed silhouettes. There is no need to recognize who does what in the flurry and entanglement of their drawings and correspondence: one need simply keep up with their frenzy and their limitless ambition.

Courtesy of  Sursock Museum

Ivan Gallery is delighted to invite you on Thursday, 31st of January, starting 7 pm, to the opening of the group show “The Web of Fabric”, CRISTINA DAVID & ANA-MARIA MACHEDON, SIMONA RUNCAN, IULIA TOMA, MĂDĂLINA ZAHARIA.

The exhibition brings together works created by artists from the gallery’s portfolio in connection to the textile material, conceived as medium, raw matter, reticular volume and surface, topic or subject. The selection of works is not bound by the limitations inherent to the technical criterion, but presents approaches that are characteristic to each of the artists’ practice, in a net of various means and media interlaced around and in extension to the web of the fabric as a generative principle for structures, textures and images.

Courtesy of Ivan Gallery

Lyons Wier Gallery is delighted to present “In Tandem,” a series of new abstract paintings by New York based artists James Austin Murray and Mark Zimmermann. Opposites attract, we’ve heard that a thousand times. “In Tandem” wonderfully demonstrates the profundity of opposition and celebrates a friendship of 20+ years. “In Tandem” attempts to decipher the dynamic dialogue between the fluidity of Austin Murray’s brushstroke and the linear explorations of Zimmermann’s painting. The artists have a share spirit in practice and principal, and they have head-strong beliefs and personalities to back it. Yet the most dynamic element about Austin Murray and Zimmermann’s work is their personal friendship. They have that “best buds” vibe when together that can only be described as infectious. If chronicled, their long-time friendship would render volumes of art theory rants and reprises, musings about methodologies embraced and abandoned all to the tone of a really good tequila. The beauty of experiencing the space between their art is to witness just how much they inspire each other and sense the connection between them.

James Austin Murray is a non-objective abstract painter whose methodology is the culmination of muscle-memory and that exact moment when intuition and practice intersect. He creates his paintings by troweling oil paint onto the face of the canvas and then pulls a stiff bristle brush across its surface in one single stroke. The marrow of Murray’s work is its optical play. The way the natural and incandescent light reflects and refracts off the ivory black paint is mesmerizing. When standing in front of one of Murray’s paintings, you can feel its pulse. There is a palpable sense of assuredness in the marks he makes which can only be defined by intuition, with a little dash of magic.

Mark Zimmermann’s work is based on the marriage of meditative fields, architectonic structures and an organic gestural line that is one part intentional and one part accidental. Zimmermann clearly demonstrates his deftness of hand through labored bands of color, building and editing one band upon other, until the editing process renders compositions that combine both hard-edge and action-painting abstraction. His process begins by layering an initial ground laid down with palette knives and trowels. From there, the initial drawing gives shape to the composition to come. Over time, the elements are pushed back with repeated layers of a viscous wash and then brought back into play via sanding and then the process begins anew. By way of intent and incident, the true pure nature of the work takes shape and the final rendering is composed.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian work collectively to create installations, paintings, and stop-motion animations that transform found materials in order to critically examine contemporary history-in-the-making. The Dubai-based artists’ animations are composed from thousands of individual works on paper, in which they collage and paint over printed stills from internet videos and television newscasts. By detaching news imagery from its original context, this body of work estranges and opens up its encoded meanings while interrogating the entertainment value of reportage and the voyeuristic role of the spectator as a passive consumer of mass-media spectacle. The artists’ ultimate aim is to break down the “othering” effect of virtual bystanding and promote recognition of our social interdependency and the value of solidarity.

The Rain Doesn’t Know Friends from Foes surveys the animations the artists have made to date and features a selection of related works on paper. The presentation marks the US debut of From Sea to Dawn (2016–17) and Macht Schon (2016), which reflect on the global immigration crisis. Also included are Big Rock Candy Mountain (2015), in which artifacts toppled by ISIS militants thwart their censors by mutating into fanciful mythic beasts; Letter! (2014), which amplifies the performative, media-induced hysteria of a protest by the radical activist group Femen; Reign of Winter (2012–13), a grotesque adaptation of the coverage of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding that underscores the arcane, densely coded nature of ceremonial spectacles; and Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (2010–11), in which media imagery from the 2009 Iranian demonstrations is transformed into a sordid pageant of monstrous animalistic humanoids. By turns joyously irreverent and intensely biting, the works presented here cast a satirical eye on representations of the present, foregrounding the irrationality and violence that underlie our hypermediated reality.

Courtesy of Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde

Composed of a survey of Mahdi Baraghithi’s early to most recent work, Zalameh delves into the notions of the body, home, and the mundane through the manipulation of found images and texts. The exhibited works produced in Palestine, France, and Lebanon, range from mixed media to installation to collage, with a focus on ongoing themes of engaging and deconstructing images of the Arab man found in popular, national, and religious culture. Baraghithi explores the positioning and gendering of the male body through the different frameworks of social and political stereotypes inscribed onto the body, which contour definitions of manhood and acceptable forms of masculinity in society.

Infused with fantastical elements of popular culture, craft, and kitsch, the artist often inserts his own body and recycled images downloaded on social media accounts to carefully perform and fabricate situations as a way to probe the stereotypes interrogated in these works. The series of collages and immersive installations together become an environment that break through the patriarchy and give an access point to a critical deconstruction of the perception of the male body. Alongside the decorative adorning of bodies and scenarios with florals, lace, and repetition, Baraghithi collects and produces cutouts of local iconography and other faceless subjects, placed against white backgrounds to produce an effect that is no longer personal yet empowered in their isolation. Here, the exhibition transports us to a maneuvered sphere determined by local popular culture, technical manipulation, and the image imaginary.

Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery.

Adel Abidin uses various media such as videos, video installations, multi media installations. His main point of departure is linked to the intention to explore the complex relationship between visual art and politics & identity. “Using a sharp palette of irony and humour I find myself gravitated towards different social situations dealing with elusive experiences and cultural alienation.” Abidin said.

Abidin uses his cross-cultural background to create a distinct visual language often laced with sarcasm and paradox, while maintaining an ultimately humanistic approach. This sarcasm he uses is nothing but a medium of provocation to serve the purpose of extending the mental borders of the artwork beyond the limits of the exhibition space. He is always interested in creating opportunities to prolong the discussions beyond his work of art by enabling the audience to convey mental elements from the work into their daily life.

Courtesy of  Galerie Tanit

Curated by Sylvia Agémian, this retrospective exhibition introduces us to the very heart of the Afaf Zurayk’s artistic adventure by grouping works spread over more than three decades. It unveils, through a variety of media, cycles, stages, and themes, a painting that is heartfelt and meditative that strikes you as much by its power as by its delicacy and spiritual quality.

Born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1948, Afaf Zurayk graduated from the American University of Beirut with a BA degree in Fine Arts in 1970, and pursued graduate studies at Harvard University, obtaining an MA degree in Fine Arts in 1972. She taught Studio Arts and Art History at Beirut University College [now the Lebanese American University], and painting at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. In Washington, DC, she taught drawing and painting in Continuing Education at the Corcoran College of Art and Design and Georgetown University. Zurayk’s painting is in the permanent collections of the Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon and Darat al Funun in Amman, Jordan. In addition to her many solo exhibitions, both in Beirut and Washington, DC, she has participated in a number of group shows, most notably the exhibition “Forces of Change” held in 1994 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. Zurayk has published three books: My Father. Reflections (2010), Lovesong (2011), and Drawn Poems (2012). Afaf Zurayk now lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon.

Courtesy of Saleh Barakat Gallery

Sfeir-Semler Gallery is happy to invite to Beirut internationally renowned Swiss artists GERDA STEINER & JÖRG LENZLINGER. Since 1997, Steiner & Lenzlinger have been developing site-specific installations that carry deep social and environmental concerns. Responding to the current ecological crisis in Lebanon, their exhibition in Beirut opens on Thursday January 17 at 7:00 PM.

Steiner & Lenzlinger create installations that blur the lines between fantasy and reality; using both natural and artificial elements specific to their discourse. While visiting Lebanon, they collected waste, as well as plants, combined to create what feels like an enchanted forest in which visitors can get lost.

Around the gallery in the Quarantine district and on the beaches of Beirut, Steiner & Lenzlinger had no difficulty finding garbage which becomes almost poetic in the context of their installation. Plants were carefully selected, conveying the unheard voices of ecological causes in Lebanon. Additionally, a collection of seeds is presented, gathered from Terbol, Lebanon through the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Arid Areas (ICARDA), whose mission is to preserve and develop agricultural capital in Africa and Asia. The Bisri Valley in South Lebanon, and the dam project that will flood several hectares of land and plants, was also a source of inspiration for the artists.

The exhibition highlights a crude reality, which visitors encounter through the lens of the duo’s ephemeral and hybrid universe. The surreal fantasy they create transports the viewer into a fabricated magical world, that cheerfully mixes organic elements and chemical fertilizer on which the installation will feed to grow and morph throughout the exhibition.

Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut is happy to present TIMO NASSERI’s solo show, after his presentations at our Beirut gallery in 2008, 2010 and 2015; the artist shows this time new works with A Universal Alphabet.

Timo Nasseri’s latest project takes as a starting point the patterns of the Razzle Dazzle, a camouflage used during World War I on boats, which was supposed to prevent the enemy from estimating their exact heading and position. The patterns consisted of geometrical shapes painted in contrasting colors, and their authorship was then claimed by three different people: the artist Norman Wilkinson, the zoologist John Graham Kerr, and Pablo Picasso.

This peculiar story leads Nasseri to deconstruct the camouflage patterns to their smallest unit, uncovering their primary shapes. The lines and colors that appear carry the echo of primitive cultures from Latin America, Africa and Asia; revealing a graphical alphabet used around the globe since the dawn of times, until it reached European warships at the turn of the 20th century.

In his work, Timo Nasseri reflects on the universality of these patterns. Experimenting with matter, he deciphers a visual code that brings these shapes to life through three-meter-high sculptures, or breaks them apart in a multitude of black folded metal signs. The ships themselves land on three-meter-high canvases and become totems or giant insects mirroring a return to origins.

The exhibition also presents drawings and sculptures inspired by the studies of Jacob Steiner (1796 – 1863), a Swiss mathematician known for his contributions to the development of modern synthetic geometry. Nasseri uses these ideas to explore quantum theory within his larger discourse on infinity. These principles ultimately lead to the belief in parallel universes, endlessly expanding across all probabilities; linking to a series of star charts which draw on Jorge Luis Borges “The Library of Babel” and reveals omnipresent elements that can only be perceived based on the viewer’s standpoint.

Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Sfeir-Semler Gallery is happy to invite to Beirut internationally renowned Swiss artists GERDA STEINER & JÖRG LENZLINGER. Since 1997, Steiner & Lenzlinger have been developing site-specific installations that carry deep social and environmental concerns. Responding to the current ecological crisis in Lebanon, their exhibition in Beirut opens on Thursday January 17 at 7:00 PM.

Steiner & Lenzlinger create installations that blur the lines between fantasy and reality; using both natural and artificial elements specific to their discourse. While visiting Lebanon, they collected waste, as well as plants, combined to create what feels like an enchanted forest in which visitors can get lost.

Around the gallery in the Quarantine district and on the beaches of Beirut, Steiner & Lenzlinger had no difficulty finding garbage which becomes almost poetic in the context of their installation. Plants were carefully selected, conveying the unheard voices of ecological causes in Lebanon. Additionally, a collection of seeds is presented, gathered from Terbol, Lebanon through the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Arid Areas (ICARDA), whose mission is to preserve and develop agricultural capital in Africa and Asia. The Bisri Valley in South Lebanon, and the dam project that will flood several hectares of land and plants, was also a source of inspiration for the artists.

The exhibition highlights a crude reality, which visitors encounter through the lens of the duo’s ephemeral and hybrid universe. The surreal fantasy they create transports the viewer into a fabricated magical world, that cheerfully mixes organic elements and chemical fertilizer on which the installation will feed to grow and morph throughout the exhibition.

Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Exhibiting the work of Irving Penn to mark the opening of a new center for contemporary image production is a mission statement, one that embraces the history of photography and the work of the late masters while looking to the future. Penn’s work is a monument of epic artistic resilience, a major reference for contemporary photography and an endless source of inspiration for generations to come.

All the photographs that appear in this exhibition are drawn from the Pinault Collection. Although in date they span more than four decades, they are presented not as a retrospective but are loosely arranged by subject.

Penn was first and foremost a studio photographer. His photographs, with their simple backdrops of paper, canvas, or bare wall, establish a spatial container at once formal and insular. Whether haute couture, still life, ethnography, or memento mori, the image is decontextualized, intense and demanding of attention.

Penn’s subjects appear at first glance to be quite disparate – celebrities, skulls, cigarette butts. But removed from their natural environment and with an unflinching focus on their materiality, they achieve a democratic leveling that is the signature of Penn’s style. Each subject is equal under his gaze, a quiet yet insistent intruder into the neutral space of the studio.

Behind Citizen Zero, the central figure in all of Houmam Al Sayed’s works, a colorful sky leaves him immovable, silent and yet crisp.

In most of Al Sayed’s work and even when the subject is accompanied by others, a palpable aloneness surrounds Citizen Zero. And if he were to come to life, explains Al Sayed, his brain would be anatomically compressed to the eighth of the size of an actual human brain. It is in times of straining social contradictions when promises of liberation confront mechanisms of social repression that artists tend to resort to the expressive gesture registering a psychic disturbance on the body.

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde is proud to present Don’t Worry Spiders, I Keep House Casually, the second solo exhibition of Dubai-based artist Hesam Rahmanian. The exhibition consists of assemblages, sculptural objects, and groupings such as “deadlines” and “corner works,” paintings that have taken on spatial, architectural form.

The name of the exhibition is derived from a haiku by famed Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), considered one of the masters of the form. Issa’s poems often reference, or are directly addressed to the often forgotten plants and forms of life that the human species shares its world with. This careful awareness of beings on the periphery of our existence extends into the work itself.

The artist’s Dubai studio and home plays a significant role in the production of these works. One of the creatures living in this collective environment, the artist shares space with fellow artists Rokni Haerizadeh and Ramin Haerizadeh, as well as a collection of accumulated and constantly shifting and manipulated artworks, objects, and materials. These objects are both finished and unfinished, new materials and detritus, being built or falling apart, and being deconstructed and destroyed.

A guiding philosophy behind the production of these works is an ontology that is oriented towards a radical equality between objects (object-oriented ontology), where there is no distinction or difference between human beings, non-human life, and objects which populate the world. In this way, the works themselves tend away from the heroism and centrality of the artist and the work of art. Instead, they focus on objects marginalised in the collective environment – a pair of pliers, a chair, the space between the shower and sink, spiders, boxes.

Courtesy of Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde.

Green Art Gallery is pleased to announce a spotlight exhibition on the Egyptian artist Samir Rafi (b.1926, Cairo, d.2004, Paris). Rafi, who at the age of 13 found himself a student of the Egyptian watercolorist Shafiq Rizk, would later go on to study with masters such as Mohamed Nagi & Ragheb Ayad. At the age of 17, his career officially began in an exhibition organised by the artist and educator Hussein Youssef Amin. Unknowingly, Samir Rafi had joined the ranks of Fouad Kamel, Ramses Younan, and Kamel El Telmessany in the Surrealist group Art et Liberté, which would go on to influence generations of Egyptian artists.

The spirit of those times, and the international current of Surrealism defined his perspective as an artist and left an indelible mark on his life’s work. By 1948 – the same year Rafi earned his Bachelors in Cairo – he had solidified his place as a member of the Contemporary Art Group alongside Hamed Nada and AbdelHady El Gazzar. His contributions to this collective – best known for its uncensored portrayal of Egyptian society – have an everlasting power.

Rafi’s oeuvre invites us into a metaphysical world of his own creation, in which his observations of the mundane are burdened by loneliness, despair, and homesickness. His use of a warped sense of perspective, dream-like colours, his mastery of line and shade, and his command of colour planes, all help define this surreal world. Perhaps best known for his trademark imagery of the female form and wolf dog, Rafi’s work almost always employs symbols extracted from his love of nature and his Egyptian childhood. These include references to ancient Egyptian and Nubian wall paintings. These interpretations are used to debate enduring themes such as family, kinship, liberty, and self-determination. Rafi’s experiences in Cairo before and after 1952, his imprisonment in Algeria in the 1960s, and his self-imposed exile in Paris all manifest themselves in his work through his characteristic technique and symbolism. The four main phases of Samir Rafi’s artistic journey are presented in this collection of works spanning half a century.

Courtesy of Green Art Gallery

Fort Gansevoort presents The Big Easy, featuring new work by New Orleans, Louisiana-based artist Keith Duncan, opening on Thursday, January 10th. Keith Duncan is a visual storyteller, depicting stories both familiar to all and those specific to New Orleans, with a focus on a multidimensional approach both in subject matter and material.

The Big Easy consists of two large-scale paintings portraying two scenes recognizable to all, The Wedding and The Funeral, both part of Duncan’s series Satire and Storytelling. These are two scenes with curiously more similarities than differences. Through Duncan’s expressive and at times comical form of visual storytelling, one will recognize many of the familiar characters in such scenes. The wedding is not without a couple of fights, the drunk uncle, and even a fainting bride. Similar roles are filled in The Funeral, including a separate party of men drinking outside of the reception created on the right side of the house. The bodies and heads of Duncan’s figures are as if carved from a block of wood rather than paint, resulting in hyper-expressive faces. All of Duncan’s chiseled faces can be seen at once. This rudimentary depiction of the many bodies filling the dance floor of The Wedding causes an effect reminiscent of procession paintings of The Renaissance, where every single figure’s face can be seen fully by the viewer, giving little importance to the depiction of a realistic point of view.

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.