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

Mohsen Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of “Shadow” a solo exhibition of new bodies of works by Mojtaba Amini, on view from January 18 to February 08, 2019.

Materials are formed by corrosion, time, and endurance. They are created with the passage of time, so they possess a time value, bearing traces of evolution. In his new exhibition, “Shadow,” Mojtaba Amini gives an account of the lives of the workers of turquoise and coal mine of Firuzabad. Exploring the usage of certain natural substances, he gives a personal narrative of materials, their inherent values, and how they have been particularly unbeneficial for the locals. “Shadow” is the story of refuge, solicitude, shadows as well as darkness, gloom, and inequity; the explorers of dark cavities and gemstones. For the people, the Nishabur turquoise mine is the equivalent of livelihood as well as divestment. The significance of labor for the local miners is not merely economic; it is rather a large part of social life of the region. Amini represents the challenges of the lives of miners in various ways and raises an issue: If the work is manual, then it results in the corrosion of the body.

Amini is an artist who criticizes the conditions and makes references to the political and social events in his work. If we categorize “Talqin” and “Xabt” under political criticism, “Children’s Program” is undoubtedly challenging regulations, and “Shadow” is expressing disapproval of social conditions. In “Shadows,” concepts pertaining to “corrosion,” “loss,” and “absence” are depicted in various forms and through different media: 1. “Yad” (lit. “Hand”) is a wide installation made of countless turquoise stones set on ring bands; 2. Uncouth collages are suspended amidst drawings and volumes; at times, they become contexts to words and in others cases they become settings for advertising posters for labor parties; 3. Appropriated images of miners that are submerged in darkness, wiping soot off their bodies; and finally, 4. “Forud” (lit. “Descent”) is a scale model of the mountains and hills that is the living environment of local miners. The installation recounts how nature treats the people of a land that do not benefit from living near mines. Their share is nothing but a flood that leaves their pockets empty: “… And showers fell from those rain clouds on the desert of Qabit until it blossomed; like a Yemeni merchant that spreads out his colorful goods on a table …” (Imru’ al-Qais)

Courtesy of Mohsen Gallery

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 you to TIMO NASSERI’s solo show, opening on January 17th, 2018 at 7PM, in the presence of the artist. 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.

Underbelly is a photographic installation that follows the trail of an imagined serial killer in the city of Beirut. It is loosely based on Roberto Bolaño’s detective novel 2666, which chronicles the murder of one hundred and twelve women in Santa Teresa and the fruitless police investigation that stems from it. As the bodies pile up, a vision of a city riddled by an underlying evil emerges. Lara Tabet ventures into the city’s outskirts, offering a portrait of Beirut at night through a fictional narrative of unsolved murders.

The corpses of the dead women are scattered around town. In the margins, the streetlights are scarce and the city guards well its dead.

The tableau photographs are taken with a large format camera. They portray crime scenes in which women’s lifeless bodies lie almost imperceptible in the theatricality of nocturnal urban space.
The tableaux are juxtaposed with microscopic photos depicting bodily fluids used in criminalistics and snapshots of fake evidence from the crime scenes, the aesthetic of which is reminiscent of forensic photography. These visuals highlight the differential meaning an object produces when transformed into a photographic subject, and reference the history of photography and its long-standing relationship to crime. From the widespread usage of forensic images as an evidence-gathering tool to the inevitable transformation of the crime scene into the site of contemporary narrative speculation and fiction, or from its documentation to its staging, murder questions notions of truth and perception.

While trespassing to take these photos, Tabet was often stopped and questioned by the police and local security. The artist uses photography as a performative and transgressive gesture, one that recurs throughout her practice, through her exploration of liminal spaces, or zones at the edge of the public and the private. By choosing to photograph “dead” women she directs a female gaze upon representations of violent acts of hypersexualization against women’s bodies, thus subverting gender roles.

Courtesy of  Galerie Janine Rubeiz

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

Lawrie Shabibi is delighted to announce Fathi Hassan’s debut solo exhibition in the gallery titled “Hemsat [Whispers]” , opening on Monday, 14 January from 6 – 9 PM.

Comprising an anthological selection of never-before exhibited pictorial and text-based works, the exhibition traces the line of the forty-year career of this Nubian Egyptian artist. The title, recalling the breeze of the desert, evokes an environment where everything moves and changes continuously.

Through his works, Hassan focuses on the interaction between spoken and written language. Single letters, words or entire sentences are repeated to form captivating yet illegible ‘texts’ that draw from Arabic calligraphy, abstract and figurative designs and symbols, allowing for shifting meaning and multiple interpretations of the words and invented graphic signs. Hassan’s dream-like stories explore issues of migration, memory, cultural belonging and loss.

Courtesy of Lawrie Shabibi

“As we are formed from dust, how is it that flowers do not sprout in us?”

Artist Soad Abdel Rasoul raises this question in the introduction to her exhibition. This question might give us a glimpse of light to unravel the mysteries of her legendary world, and to make us wonder whether art follows the logic of things as we know them in the world in which we live, or whether it creates its own world and inner logic. Is it part of our pains, dreams, aspirations, or frustrations, or does it create its own private and intimate feelings? And, therefore, do the creatures of the artist’s world resemble us and our world at least in some qualities, or are they unique and individual, and it is up to us as viewers to try to understand this world as it is without projecting ourselves upon it? And more importantly, does the artist create his own world consciously, or is he a psychic recalling it by the magic of art and the spell of visual language ?

Soad Abdel Rasoul explores the intertwined relationship between human and nature by evoking the strength of the universe that lies within us. Her characters, which exalt the feminine, the emotional, and the overgrowing natural, merge on large-size canvases to remind viewers of the vital bond between the interior of the human body and the exterior.

Galerie Max Hetzler is delighted to announce an exhibition with works by Inge Mahn. This is the artist’s first show at the Paris gallery.

Drawing from the everyday, German sculptor Inge Mahn consciously alienates the commonplace, sensibly manipulating motifs to unlock a range of incongruous possibilities. Working predominantly with white plaster, the artist estranges objects through raw modelling, re-contextualisation, subtle subtractions and additions. In Mahn’s practice, discrete sculptural elements and installations are meant to be activated by independent structures. Purposely ignoring the notion of the self-standing work of art, Mahn creates works that interact with broader architectural, historical and socio-political contexts, often formulating responses to specific environments. Foregoing the ready-made principle and the traditional concept of architectural and monumental sculpture, the works testify to the artist’s democratic intentions – often time-based or kinetic, they trigger one’s memories to comment on a range of issues such as authority, power and individuality.

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.

Dar El-Nimer for Arts and Culture presents A National Monument, an exhibition by Visualizing Palestine and Marwan Rechmaoui. Inspired by a series of highly detailed maps of Palestine from the British Mandate period, the main installation recreates a 3-dimensional snapshot of the major Palestinian cities and towns circa 1947, based on the final British surveys before the Nakba. The installation consists of over 30 3-dimensional pieces derived from the original maps and topographic data from NASA. The exhibition also features prints from a series of 1:20,000 topo-cadastral maps from the 1940s, and other works by Visualizing Palestine, including Palestine Open Maps, an online platform for exploring past and present maps of Palestine.

This collaboration was initiated by Ahmad Barclay, a long time partner with Visualizing Palestine, building on an ongoing vision to build partnerships with practitioners across art, design and cultural disciplines. The title ‘A National Monument’ is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the words of J. F. Salmon, director of the Palestine Survey (1933-38), who once wrote: ‘A good topographical survey should be looked upon as a national monument of the first importance.’ Words that take on unintended new meanings in light of the dramatic transformation of the territory over the past seven decades.

Lyons Wier Gallery is pleased to present “My Kitchen Table” by Chelsea Gibson.

Chelsea Gibson paints portraits of home. Home for the upstate New York artist is not a static entity; it cannot not be measured in square feet or valued in dollars. Rather, home is a feeling-something experienced-that roots itself in a person’s relationship to space, time, things, and people.

To capture and emit the performative sense of the home, Gibson loads many of her paintings with what some would call quotidian clutter, but that together speak volumes outside of the singular moment being painted. While all of Gibson’s subjects are in some ways defined by and also defining their surroundings, the real potency of the artist’s work resides in her own (seemingly unseen) presence. There is an intimacy in the paintings-a deeply personal and profound attachment to the people, things, and spaces depicted-that takes on an almost Proustian quality in the age of social media. In this way, the work is a meditation on life-on our relationship to our surroundings, but ultimately, on our relationship with ourselves.

Courtesy of Lyons Wier Gallery

Daniele Genadry, Ahmad Ghossein, and Hassan Zahreddine will be in conversation around Hatem Imam’s solo exhibition Threshold at Letitia Gallery in Beirut. This informal conversation format aims to trigger commentaries on Imam’s current artistic inquiry in relation to other artists’ practices dealing with a similar subject matter or comparable techniques in their own distinctive practices, visual languages and conceptual interests.

Threshold is curated by Amanda Abi Khalil and is on view from 15 November 2018 to 19 January 2019. It is recommended that the audience visits the exhibition at Letitia Gallery prior to attending the conversation.

Courtesy of the artist and Letitia Gallery

Custot Gallery Dubai is pleased to present a major exhibition of still life paintings, drawings and watercolours by
the internationally renowned Colombian artist, Fernando Botero. These works, which come from the artist’s own
collection and are being exhibited for the first time, were created between 1980 and 2018.
Throughout thirty still life works representing flowers, fruit, objects, musical instruments and fantastic scenes of
everyday moments, the artist pays tribute to the Old Master paintings he studied as a young student in Europe
during the 1950s.

Courtesy of Custot Gallery Dubai

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.