Delfina Foundation is proud to present Amma Baad, an exhibition of sculptural objects and works on paper by former artist-in-residence Nasser Al Salem. Curated by Maya El Khalil and presented in partnership with Shubbak Festival, the show is Al Salem’s first solo exhibition in the UK.

Amma Baad continues the artist’s expansive approach to the practice of Arabic calligraphy, both in terms of form and through his conceptual approach to the phrases with which he works. In this new series, Al Salem contemplates the Arabic phrase ‘amma baad’, an expression that proves difficult to translate into English. Often found in formal Arabic correspondence, the expression follows initial salutations and greetings, while preceding – and perhaps anticipating – the main subject or story to follow. It is a moment dense with expectations.

Courtesy of Delfina Foundation

We are thrilled to announce that Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian will be participating in Homeless Souls at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark.

Taking up themes of exile and expatriation, the exhibition presents a number of exceptional international artists, whose work speaks directly to our conflict-ridden times. Hailing from countries as diverse as Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Algeria and Kosovo, the artists work from their own stories and experiences, which they examine and treat in art that is both topical and timeless, universal and highly personal.

Homeless Souls brings together a dozen artistic voices from countries around the world for a conversation about exile as a political and existential reality. Presenting both personal and collective stories, the exhibition adds new perspectives to subjects like exile, demarcation, citizenship, cross-border movements, secret journeys and identity.

Several of the works are made especially for this exhibition. The participating artists in the exhibition are: Kader Attia (b. 1970, France), Tiffany Chung (b. 1969, Vietnam), Forensic Oceanography (Lorenzo Pezzani (b. 1982, Italy) & Charles Heller (b. 1981, US), Shilpa Gupta (b. 1976, India), Ramin Haerizadeh (b. 1975, Iran), Rokni Haerizadeh (b. 1978, Iran), Hesam Rahmanian (b. 1980, US), Petrit Halilaj (b. 1986, Kosovo), Hiwa K (b. 1975, Iraq), Nalini Malani (b. 1946. Born in Karachi, undivided India), Otobong Nkanga (b. 1974, Nigeria), Erkan Özgen (b. 1971, Turkey), Lydia Ourahmane (b. 1992, Algeria), Kara Walker (b. 1969, US)

Courtesy of Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde

Loretta Howard Gallery is pleased to present What Matters by Nicolas Carone. Seven paintings and four works on paper offer a compelling cross section of the artist’s late period. The linear mark making that fill his paintings evokes the immediacy of a drawing. Similarly, his works on paper maintain a tonal, painterly quality and illustrate the artist’s lifelong commitment to both mediums. Filled with deep washes of grey, white and black, each canvas is punctuated with loose skeins of paint and linear brushwork that suggest the contours of the figure.

Nicolas Carone’s work is featured in a number of public collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, High Museum of Art; Atlanta, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Washington, DC, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; New York, Norton Museum of Art; Palm Beach. Sheldon Museum of Art; University of Nebraska, Smithsonian American Art Museum; Washington, DC, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; New York, Tate Modern; London, Walker Art Center; Minneapolis, Weatherspoon Museum of Art; Greensboro, and Whitney Museum of American Art; New York.

An exhibition catalog with an essay by Barbara Rose and the artist’s biographer Frank Messina is forthcoming.

Almine Rech is pleased to present a new exhibition of works by Jannis Kounellis. This is the Artist’s first exhibition in the United Kingdom since his passing, in February 2017. Comprising works Kounellis made between 1960 and 2014, the exhibition intends to act as an extensive overview of the Artist’s career.

Characteristic of Kounellis’ installation practice, two steel and coal works from 2013 and 2014 demonstrate the artist’s exploration around the weight of energy points and how these may impact space. Indeed, the piles of coal framed by Kounellis’ identifiable steel supports also function as a link to notions of smoke, an ever-present subject in his practice, as well as fire and industry. A link can also be seen between these two works and Kounellis’ personal relationship with the sea and with peripatetic travelling, specifically the Homeric notion of Nostos, the journey of a hero returning home by sea from Troy. Throughout the artist’s career, references abound to his birthplace, the Greek port of Piraeus, the former heart of the Greek shipping industry, and to transportation vessels, with Kounellis emerging as an Odysseus-like figure, on a constant voyage.

The exhibition is completed with a further two works from 2014. Featuring jute and red oil, these artworks are concerned with the juxtaposition of precariousness and fragility with the robust iron surface which they are each comprised of. These works, which are amongst Kounellis’ final ones, conjure ideas of creation and destruction, and see the artist continue in his pursuit for art in everyday life.

Concurrently with the exhibition of works by Jannis Kounellis at Almine Rech London, the artist is the subject of an extensive retrospective at the Fondazione Prada in Venice, running from 11 May through 24 November 2019. The exhibition is curated by Germano Celant, who first coined the term Arte Povera in 1967, when he published the movement’s manifesto, Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerilla War.

We welcome back Düsseldorf-based painter Driss Ouadahi for Extra Muros (outside the walls), his third solo at the gallery, with a series of new paintings, which mark a departure from his work of the last decade, alongside earlier paintings that show his trajectory over the last decade and a half. Whilst Ouadahi’s earlier works (shown in the two previous exhibitions at the gallery) demonstrate social and political concerns, his new works shift from social structures to exercises in geometry and light, bringing his practice full circle.

Following a visit to Algeria fifteen years ago, Ouadahi’s first return home since leaving to study in Dusseldorf, his paintings were predicated around the politics of class, religion, and ethnicity. The physical boundaries in the city of Algiers and the sense otherness affected him on that trip, and the first works he made thereafter were of heavy concrete modernist buildings: Postwar faceless housing estates, as present in Algeria as they are in France and metropolitan areas of other European countries, which segregate the societies that dwell within them from the surrounding urban fabric. Ouadahi’s fence paintings, his underground paths and his urban landscapes all sprang from that experience.

In Extra Muros we show one of these early works, Carcasse/Heimat (2005), a large format painting made soon after this trip. A powerful expression of these concerns, with its brutalist alienating architecture and grid with a strong horizontal emphasis, this painting is a precursor of Ouadahi’s urban landscapes of the next decade.

Since 2017 onwards Ouadahi sought to rebuild his method of painting, but without leaving his general concept. In his abstract sketches and painterly experiments, Ouadahi attempts to shatter his previous practice. Stripping away all recognizable traces of urban settings, focusing instead on light and transparency, his latest works are devoid of social commentary, and instead about engendering a kind of feeling through visual sensation. These luminous, transparent, impossible spaces highlight the process of painting itself and the meditative qualities of the painting and the space it evokes.

Courtesy of Lawrie Shabibi

Sfeir-Semler Gallery is happy to announce the opening of the third solo show of MOUNIRA AL SOLH in our Beirut space. Please join us to celebrate the artist at the opening on May 2nd, 2019 from 7PM to 9PM.

In this new exhibition Mounira Al Solh concentrates on women rights, women stories and their position in History in the Arab region.

In the entrance of the space, on a coffee-painted wall, a green neon and a chandelier made out of used plastic and cardboard cups, welcome the visitors. It navigates the thin line between spirituality and religious bigotry, mixing raw and reused materials.

Since 2012, Al Solh has been drawing and telling stories derived from one to one conversations with displaced people living in her direct neighborhood; as well as testimonies of refugees, exiled individuals and families. These series of drawings, around 500 so far, are a time and a socio-geographic displacement document. Many of these drawings were exhibited at documenta14 in Kassel, and at the Art Institute in Chicago as well as at Mathaf in Qatar.

Based on this research, Al Solh has been embroidering tents and textile shelters as well as quilts including patterns and figurative drawings; following the traditions of women practices in all civilizations, especially in the Arab ones.

A new series of paintings mixes fictional stories by women writers, and those about detained women and their sufferings in prison, in a firework of colors and forms.

In the cinema room of the gallery, we present a film that investigates how historical unrest is registered as personal or family traumas; and recounts the experiences of the artist’s maternal and paternal ancestors in Lebanon and Syria during the First World War, and the Nasserite and Pan-Arab revolutionary movements of the 1950s and 1960s.

We are happy to announce that Mathaf, Qatar has just published a monographic book about this project which is available at the gallery.

*Exhibition runs until August 10th, 2019

Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present two concurrent exhibitions devoted to Piero Manzoni, a seminal figure of postwar Italian Art and progenitor of Conceptualism. During a brief but influential career that ended upon his untimely death in 1963, Manzoni evolved from a self-taught abstract painter into an artistic disruptor. Curated by Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo, director of the Piero Manzoni Foundation in Milan, the exhibitions ‘Piero Manzoni. Materials of His Time’ and ‘Piero Manzoni. Lines’ unfold over two floors of the gallery and focus upon Manzoni’s most significant bodies of work: his Achromes (paintings without color) and Linee (Lines) series.

‘Materials of His Time’ features more than 70 of Manzoni’s radical Achromes and surveys the artist’s revolutionary approach to unconventional materials, such as sewn cloth, cotton balls, berglass, bread rolls, synthetic and natural fur, straw, cobalt chloride, polystyrene, stones, and more. Traveling from Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, the exhibition situates Manzoni as a peer of such artists as Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, whose experiments continue to influence contemporary art-making today. ‘Materials of His Time’ also presents, for the first time in New York, the items on a wish list Manzoni outlined in a 1961 letter to his friend Henk Peeters: a room all in white fur, and another coated in fluorescent paint, totally immersing the visitor in white light.

The presentation of Manzoni’s work continues on the third floor with ‘Lines,’ an exhibition of over 35 works that constitute his most considered and serialized explorations. Developed in parallel with his Achromes, Manzoni’s Linee series began in 1959 and includes short, simple bands traversing rectangular sheets of paper, and increasingly long traces created with a roller on strips of paper. The artist produced a total of 90 Linee works of varying lengths, which he then sealed in cylindrical containers. The series culminated in 1960 with ‘Linea lunga 7.200 metri’ (Line 7200 Meters Long), made in Herning, Denmark. In addition to Manzoni’s cylindrical wooden sculpture ‘Linea di lunghezza in nita’ (Line of Infinite Length) (1960), a purely conceptual work, Hauser & Wirth is pleased to feature ‘12 Linee,’ a reconstruction of the artist’s exhibition originally staged in 1959 for the opening of the illustrious Azimut gallery in Milan. Also on view in the exhibition is the short film ‘Le lunghe linee,’ presented for the first time with a new soundtrack. Despite the extraordinary importance of the series for the artist, this is the first time a major exhibition has been staged around the Linee.

The two exhibitions, with installation designs by Stephanie Goto, are complemented by a special presentation of archival material from the collection of Guido and Gabriella Pautasso. Books, documents, and typewritten manuscripts authored by Manzoni shed light on his methodology. Curated by Guido Pautasso and Irene Stucchi, the display of archival materials that accompanied Manzoni’s practice adds another dimension to his life, tracing the artist’s biography reanimating his personal and creative journey for a contemporary audience.

On the occasion of ‘Materials of His Time’ and ‘Lines,’ Hauser & Wirth Publishers has released a box set of two new catalogs providing a comprehensive historical-critical analysis of Manzoni’s two major bodies of work.

Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

The new season at the Palazzo Cini Gallery opens with an exceptional exhibition: the first solo show ever staged in Italy by Adrian Ghenie (b. 1977), entitled The Battle between Carnival and Feast.

Following significant projects in prestigious venues, such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Venice Biennale and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fondazione Cini hosts a show by the highly acclaimed Romanian painter in an unprecedented dialogue with the rooms and history of the house-museum of the Palazzo Cini. For the occasion, Ghenie exhibits a series of nine stunning paintings, some on show for the first time, inspired by the history of Venice, but always linked to the more controversial, darker issues of today’s world. The exhibition has been organised in collaboration with Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.

Courtesy of Palazzo Cini Gallery

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