Throughout history, humans adopted myths as a tool to understand the world around them.

From prehistoric cave drawings and Ancient Greece to contemporary art, artists have embraced mythology within their practice to tell stories and more recently to reinvent history.

During a time of social distancing, rise of biopolitics and the breakdown of daily routines HOFA Gallery presents Myth-Making exhibition, to explore a concept which is an integral part of the artistic aesthetic language.

Through examining these works through the lens of Myth-Making, the exhibition aims to achieve two interrelated goals: to analyse individual artists and the multifaceted artistic practices, as well as to explore the historical and cultural relevance of myth-making.

While we continue to occupy the digital world more so than ever before, Myth-Making welcomes the viewer into the 3D virtual viewing room, encouraging a shared experience of celebration of artistic practice and reinvention of tradition.

Courtesy of HOFA Gallery

We are delighted to announce the first solo exhibition by Gideon Rubin in Italy.

Rubin creates paintings where the figures are rendered without their facial features. Thus the gaze of the viewer is not captured by physiognomy, but by the atmosphere unleashed by the entire images; the subjects are characterized by their positions and attitudes, by the way they move in space and dress.

Evanescent and melancholic, Rubin’s works speak of a past or a recollection that has surfaced in memory. The paint is dense and seductive, with fluid strokes that describe intimate atmospheres and complicity between the subjects portrayed. With their forcefully evocative character, these figures trigger direct empathy in the viewer.

The subjects are depicted during everyday activities; the artist draws us into moments of elusive intimacy. A couple walking with arms around each other, a young woman undressing, flowers gradually wilting become part of a temporal dimension of slowness and calm. Landscapes are barely indicated settings, colors that stand out, revealing parts of untouched canvas.

The delicate colors used by Rubin – sandy tones, grayish blues, milky whites – combined with the multiple brushstrokes on the canvas suggest the desire to bring something almost forgotten back to life and give it permanence. The viewer can complete the missing details using his own memories.

The sources for Rubin’s works are mostly found images, old photographs that belong to a personal but anonymous past, or recent images from magazine belonging to contemporary culture. The artist collects them, creating an archive of images for his paintings, a sort of act of re-appropriation of personal memories and stories. The subjects, though differing in nature, are stylistically comparable, equalized with one another. Past and present, conscious and unconscious, personal and universal are equivalent in the eyes of the artist. Rubin’s works thus narrate fragments of a wider, complex history of multiple implications, whose many sources, artistic citations and mass media culture, are reworked in a very personal pictorial language.

The erasure of facial features in Rubin’s works takes on an unintentional resonance in the present pandemic: the surgical masks we are all wearing now remove our main identifying characteristics, making us become abstract and enigmatic, but at the same time real and vital, like the subjects he depicts.

Courtesy of Monica de Cardenas.

Fort Gansevoort will present Nightshift, an exhibition of drawings by Michelangelo Lovelace (b. 1960), composed from the bedsides and common areas of nursing homes throughout Cleveland, Ohio, where he has worked for over 30 years as a nurse’s aide while pursuing his artistic practice.

The third exhibition in the gallery’s ongoing web series SEEING THOUGH YOU, Nightshift allows viewers to gaze into the daily lives of nursing home residents through 22 drawings that capture the vitality of spirit and depth of emotional life that persist in old age. Detailed, personal, direct, and inflected with flashes of wit, Lovelace’s portraits and observational scenes are shaped by his rare access to a swath of society too often overlooked or forgotten. As nursing homes across the country are pillaged by the COVID 19 pandemic, America has been forced to confront its biases toward the elderly. Lovelace, largely known for his vibrant paintings of inner-city Cleveland, has never been shy about depicting communities that remain conveniently but tragically relegated to the margins. In the Nightshift drawings, viewers find the artist at his most fearless and his most tender. While his work typically paints crime and poverty-filled streets from afar, Nightshift places Lovelace in close proximity to and intimate exchange with his subjects. Illustrated with an astute quietude, his nursing home images celebrate the accumulated experience and enduring life force that define each individual as singular and substantial in spite of being deemed negligible by society at large.

Nightshift is curated in collaboration with artist John Ahearn and includes Ahearn’s commentary on a central group of the works included in the exhibition. Nightshift will remain on view at Fort Gansevoort’s website through July 9, 2020.

Courtesy of Fort Gansevoort

Richard Levy Gallery is pleased to present a selection of 9 photographs by Rania Matar from the series SHE.  In this new body of work, Matar focuses on collective identity by photographing young woman on the brink of adulthood from two different cultures.

The images from SHE are the result of a collaborative process.  Unlike her previous work where settings were largely curated, her subjects now actively participate in the image making process by interacting within the expansive surroundings of the outdoors. Personal narratives emerge as Matar captures these young women embracing life, getting dirty, takings risks, having fun and ultimately courageously taking ownership of their environments.

“My work addresses the states of ‘Becoming’– the fraught beauty and the vulnerability of growing up –in the context of the visceral relationships to our physical environment and universal humanity, but it is also about collaboration, experimentation, performance, empowerment, and about pushing the limits of creativity and self-expression ‐ both for the young women and for myself.”

Courtesy of Richard Levy Gallery.

The exhibition Palestinian Art: Resilience and Inspiration presents a group of prominent Palestinian artists, who have been inspirational not only to the younger generation of artists in Palestine but equally to the wider audience. In a time of defiance and instability in the region, the artworks deliver a message of resilience in the face of all odds.

In Khaled Hourani’s works, the spirit of resilience is apparent and strong. Each work presents a child jumping high in the air over the Israeli Apartheid Wall, that appears of no significance or importance. Hourani focuses on the young generation, who takes upon themselves to challenge occupation regardless of what happens in the political arena; these are the same kids who are seen in demonstrations on the streets bare-chested challenging heavy Israeli artillery, the children of the future.

On the other hand, Nabil Anani’s series of artworks titled “Demonstration”, present tangled bodies of women, men and children moving in different motions. The spontaneity of the people – women holding children, couples hugging, children sitting on the shoulders of mothers, reflects the centrality of protest against the occupation in the lives of Palestinians. In each artwork one can catch a glimpse of a domestic animal; a dog, a dove or a goat hidden between the human bodies as if the artist is trying to include various elements of the daily life in these communal actions.

On a long stretch of canvas, Sliman Mansour’s “Revolution was the Beginning” tells the story of Palestine since the Nakba of 1948. Starting with the displacement of Palestinians the artist presents several milestones in the Palestinian struggle. The canvas starts with a scene of a refugee camp under a dark thundery sky (on the right) and ends up with an image of a young man and woman marching while carrying a Palestinian flag, (on the far left). Several direct symbols appear in the artwork, reflecting the right of return, imprisonment, the Apartheid Wall, martyrdom and the transformation of the nature of the Palestinian struggle through history. The artist makes the Dome of the Rock and olive groves, a focal point in the painting.

Tayseer Barakat participates with two artworks titled “Light in the Dark”. Unlike the classic realism style of Hourani, Anani and Mansour, both works are abstract in style. Yet the artworks tell the story of people in confinement yearning for freedom. They consist of several windows of mainly black and white colors, each presenting a different story: 1948 Nakba, dispossession, the Intifada, Israeli invasions of Palestinian towns, the Apartheid Wall, Jerusalem, and other details of living under occupation. One can notice a competition between the black and the white colors, a fight for domination in each square as if the artist is redeeming the “white” from a well of a lost memory (black) in an attempt of documentation for future generations.

Mirror Party by Wafa Hourani, is a many layered artwork reflecting the realities of living under occupation. The installation presents a segment of the Israeli Apartheid Wall with the prediction of “the emergence of a Palestinian political party who places a large mirror along the Apartheid Wall making it disappear.” While demonstrating the significance of the wall in size in relation to the figures, the installation, in its core, criticizes the Palestinian internal political situation and raises questions about the beautification of the wall as opposed to confronting the political reality.

Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery

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Since the late 1980s, Dahoul’s Dream series has explored the physical and psychological effects of alienation, solitude, and longing that punctuate the human experience at various stages in life. Partly autobiographical, this seminal body of work uses the formal properties of painting to recreate the subconscious sense of enclosure that surfaces during times of crisis, whether in the event of mourning, estrangement, or political conflict.

In his last body of work, with the aptly titled exhibition Still Dreaming Dahoul questions “Are we still dreaming?”. Moving away from the romanticism of dreams and the shelter they offer while still expressing himself through a subconscious voice, Safwan has awoken, and so has his protagonist, placing his voice in what seems to be a more lifelike environment metaphorically. Reality and its inconsistency are mirrored in the canvas through sharper lines and, most importantly, folds and ripples, illustrating life’s obstacles.

The artist is posing questions through disfiguration, and distortion, stressing hardship and troubles while leaving some space for hope and answers. As the artist explains it, his paintings are his life’s chronicles. The artist’s loss of stability is explored in this new series. Explicitly, and unintentionally the artist found himself tackling the story of the displaced through crumbled images; with his ripples, the artist is exploring uncertainty through the imperfect reflection of contemporary humanity.

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Courtesy of Ayyam Gallery.

Contemporary Heritage is mixed media, visual artist, Harb’s first solo at the gallery since 2015 and will bring together a fresh body of work the cuts across disciplines and continues to push the boundaries of the contemporary art framework.

This new body of work sees the artist observe the notion of heritage as unfixed and fluid. Underscoring Palestinian academic, Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism whereby through the imposition of soft powers history is reshaped for various agendas, Harb observes that while transferred from generation-to-generation, heritage also collides with colonial discourses resulting in new meanings that subsume the stories of the original owners who are often forcibly absent.
A consistent thread throughout Harb’s practice has been the preoccupation with the Palestinian people and their collective and subjective narratives which he investigates both in the literal sense – referring to archives and academic texts as the foundations of his work and in the sense of physical investigation through the deployment of his materials. The artist, in continual flow, oscillates between mediums, drawn to those which he maintains best convey the sentiments of each new concept. Harb has previously worked with film, photography, installation, collage and textile and now leans towards a fresh mode of representation that reconfigures the past.

As well as a large-scale collage triptych in Harb’s now-ubiquitous contemporary collage format Contemporary Heritage will see the artist produce new works in relief form, transposing 1920s Palestinian archival imagery into etchings that come to form compelling contemporary artefacts much like those of the forgotten societies now resigned to museums. As the debate surrounding looted antiquities looms large in the west, Harb’s reliefs, presented as the findings of archaeologists, are at once preserving history but also highlighting the ease at which certain communities, absent from the rhetoric and its presentation, become reduced to a historical exhibit in a foreign land.

Courtesy of Tabari Artspace.

Green Art Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition with the recent works by Kamrooz Aram, Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan and Ana Mazzei.

Kamrooz Aram’s work is rooted in the history and practice of painting, which he expands to include collage, photography, sculptural works and exhibition design. His work engages the complicated relationship between Modernism and ornament, often with reference to non-western ornamental art, which he sees as a parallel to painting. Aram’s work sets out to renegotiate the art historical hierarchy that places these ornamental artforms in a category of value beneath fine art.

Aram’s paintings explore the ornamental potential in abstraction, while challenging the notion of ornament as superfluous form. His sculptural works evoke the display strategies of museums, especially those which house so called decorative arts. His recent exhibitions often function as works in their own right. Combining painting, sculpture, collage and exhibition design, he creates an interdependence between object and display, in an effort to reveal the significance of design and architecture in affecting the interpretation of art objects.

This work was commissioned by Yarat Art Centre in Baku, as part of their exhibition Fragile Frontiers: Visions on Iran’s in/visible borders ( 22 Nov 2019 – 16 Feb 2020).

Each of Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck’s artworks is connected to current political events, which he uses to question propaganda strategies employed to convey values such as freedom, prosperity, security, and utopia, interweaving these principles with oil policies and global economic ties. Working in a variety of media, including photography, film, installation, and found materials, his discourse juxtaposes disparate elements from a variety of disciplines and sources in order to contextualize historical problems, from the Cold War to oil exploitation in present-day circumstances.

The collage series “All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset” (2018) was first commissioned and exhibited at the 2019 Sharjah Biennale. In this work, Balteo-Yazbeck has collaged and assembled materials and topics from advertising, propaganda, the news, social media, sleek technologies and even interior design. Here, different iterations of this age-old maxim evoke the evolution of hubris for more than four thousand years up until the present, including the old British characterization of the empire – “the empire on which the sun never sets”. Spelled in extremely colorful collages and encoded as hashtags or email addresses such as #fosilfuel, these collage works resemble cut-out-letter ransom notes.

Hera Büyüktaşçıyan‘s Terrestrial I – II – III (2019) is a drawing series that explores the notion of land, territory and erasure of the remnants of time caused by ruptures of complex histories.

By using archival photographs from archeological excavations of the city of Pergamon*, the work explores the relationship between power and architecture, disappearance and reconstruction, scale and representation. Within the photographs, villagers who work in the excavations of Pergamon are documented in to measure the physicality and monumentality of each site in contrast to their existence. These scenes becomes a reference to the artist whilst looking into cross sections of what is physical and virtual and the axes between representation of power and its destructive elements… as well as what it leaves behind as a reminder of time. Through photographic images the piece not only retraces history and time but also studies these traces by unfolding their invisible borders and enable them to become the embodiment of erased topographies or the abstraction of missing spaces and architectural fragments. The mosaic like surface rubbed with graphite allows the representation of time and space to dissolve into an uncanny formation and become a cartographic reflection of lost /forgotten physical and mental spaces.

Men and narratives, in their inseparable relationships, define Ana Mazzei’s interest. It is from this perspective that her work develops and grows.

For Mazzei, art, architecture and landscapes construct, in themselves, a fiction that connects them, resulting in installations, settings and objects. Beyond the formalist exercises, these floor objects invoke unidentified stories that suggest hidden and impenetrable archetypal structures. This dual movement, suggesting and retaining the symbolic value of the objects, is recurrent in her practice.

Her artworks are like pieces and fragments of myths, lives and fictions that are represented in drawings, videos, sculptures and installations. At other times, her works function as observation devices framing this vast repertoire from a specific point of view. Focusing on a widely experimental practice, the artist appropriates different sensorial materials, such as felt and concrete, connecting to the environments in which she works.

*The city of Pergamon, now Bergama in Turkey, has experienced many fluxes throughout history, from its loss of cultural heritage through colonialism, the 1922 Asia Minor Catastrophe, and mostly recently the rapid urban and demographic transformation due to neo-liberal political agendas. 

Courtesy of Green Art Gallery.

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