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.

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

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

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

For his solo exhibition and debut at the gallery, Khorfakkan-based artist, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim presents The Space Between the Eyelid and the Eyeball, comprising three bodies of work that span his engagement with painting and sculpture. Linking each of these works is Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim’s compulsive and intuitive sense of repetition, variation and humor.

The exhibition revolves around a large group of irregular-shaped sculptures that dominate the gallery floor space. Some resemble pylons or scaffolding, others toys, animals, trees and fruit. The brightly coloured papier-mâché sculptures are made of natural paper pigments combined by the artist, their vivid repeated lines of colour consistent with the obsessive mark-making of his practice, whilst the shapes reflect the natural formations of his domestic landscape. His choice of vibrant and at times garish colour combinations seek to capture the “explosion in his eyes” he experienced when he first saw the sunset – until that moment life between the Hajar Mountains had obstructed its view.

Black and white papier-mâché architectonic works, part painting, part sculpture, part collage line one of the gallery’s walls a seriesfirst shown at his survey at Sharjah Art Foundation in 2018. Drawing from Ibrahim’s two-dimensional Linesseries (drawings of black or white lines that are reminiscent of ancient cave markings) these peculiar pieces have a primordial quality tothem – a grouping of hand-molded oblong shapes wedged with blocks, slivers or bodies of paper hanging from strings. At times minimal,at times complex, the works play with notions of multiplicity and division.

On the other walls are groups of Sitting Man portraits, an intriguing series in different sizes and colours in which the head of the sitter is always cropped, moving the focus instead to the bodily posture and clothing. The image was originally taken froma photograph of his friend, the late artist Hassan Sharif, Ibrahim’s mentor and pioneer of conceptual art in the UAE.

Courtesy of Lawrie Shabibi

This March, Meem Gallery, Dubai, in collaboration with GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins / Habana, is delighted to present Moataz Nasr’s debut film, The Mountain.
Last seen as part of an immersive, multi-sensory experience in the Egyptian pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale, the 12-minute film tells the story of Zein, a young girl who leaves her isolated village in mountainous Upper Egypt to continue her studies. On her return, Zein, now an educated, worldly youngb woman, challenges the deep-set superstitions and conventions of her village by flouting the authority of the disapproving local elders. Addressing the abiding and universal conflict between enlightened youth and the conservative establishment, Nasr uses the mountain as a metaphor for triumph over of the village ‘demon’ (fear) which lives on top of the mountain and terrorises the villagers after sunset. Taking her father’s staff, seemingly, a symbol of patriarchal authority, Zein makes her way up the mountain, cautiously followed by the villagers, and stabs it into the heart of the mountain before falling to the ground. The viewer, as well as the assembled crowd, is left wondering if she is alive or has made the ultimate sacrifice.
Despite its simple, rural setting, this fable, that demonstrates the collective, paralysing fear that breeds inaction and hinders the possibility of progress, can be applied universally. Dedicated to the artist’s three daughters, The Mountain also delivers a distinctly feminist message about the bravery of women who challenge the status quo.

Mohammad El Rawas’ (b. 1951) latest exhibition showcases a new body of work and highlights some older paintings, including two monumental works which were produced forty years apart, Train I and Train II. The former was the artist’s final-year project at the Lebanese University’s Institute of Fine Arts, from which he graduated thereafter in 1975 with honors. Having not seen this painting again until 2015, El Rawas produced Train II as a reflection on the earlier work.

The year of El Rawas’ graduation marked the beginning of the civil war in Lebanon, leading the artist to stop painting and to leave his country for Rabat, Morocco where he remained for two years, teaching art and eventually resuming painting. He returned to Beirut in 1979 to hold his first solo show, before joining the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the same year on scholarship from the Lebanese University. Upon his return to Beirut in 1981 with a Masters Degree in printmaking, he started his academic career at the Lebanese University and the American University of Beirut, which lasted for 27 years. Since 1979, El Rawas has held 11 individual exhibitions in Beirut, London and Dubai and has participated in more than 40 international art biennials and exhibitions in the UK, USA, Norway, Tunisia, Brazil, Japan, Kuwait, France, Netherlands, Egypt, UAE, Poland and China. In these international shows he won five prizes and honorable mentions including, in 2007, the award of the Alexandria Biennale for Mediterranean Countries, for his first installation and vedio art piece. His work is found in many museums and public collections in Lebanon, Tunisia, Iraq, Jordan, UAE, Norway and the UK.

Courtesy of Saleh Barakat Gallery

“I met Dinah in 2017 at her home in Paris, where she showed me different series from her work. For those few hours spent together, I could not feel time passing. I was living in a story, her story.

At first glance, her work on memory fascinated me: collages, drawings on paper, linen, and ceramics, created to record instants from her daily life. A sense of floating emerges from her writings, emanating from a hand that is at ease with both writing and calligraphy. Her inscriptions, firmly rooted in the present, incorporate traces and tempos of past journeys, demonstrating a kinship with traditional Arabic calligraphy.
Dinah left Lebanon at the age of 13 for Milan, then moved to Paris, where she graduated from high school before studying architecture. In her work, one can instantly feel the meticulous endeavor of the architect that she is. The houses, neighborhoods and gardens that she longs to keep alive in her memory carry great aesthetic and emotional value.
This exhibition bears witness to her promenades in Beirut as a teenager, and later in Los Angeles. These works have in common the geography, the cities’ layout and their chaos, the texture, the sea and the light.

In 1975, not suspecting that she and Beirut would part ways, she began writing her diary. These same pages would later emerge as “Journal 1975”: a retrospective close-up installation about her daily life in 1975 – Dinah’s final year in Beirut.
The excerpts of the pages are mainly about neighborhoods such as Zarif, Chiah, Ain el Remmaneh, Achrafieh, Saint Simon, and especially the Saint Georges, present in many of her paintings.

What fascinated Dinah as a teenager was that feeling of freedom to explore “her” city, on foot, by bicycle, or by bus…
These representations of her journeys are intertwined with strolls through the Beirut of today. They do not try to trace what is or what has been. They are a moving narrative, one that prevents memory from being confined to the lost territories of childhood.
In Los Angeles, her paintings are inspired by nature, urban geography, the light, the freedom to be and to float, which mark the city’s identity and bring her back to her perpetual strolls. To live in Los Angeles is to wander, to lose one’s inner compass, and to experience a permanent feeling of disorientation where the East is so near, yet so far away.”

– Nadine Majdalani Begdache

Courtesy of  Galerie Janine Rubeiz

Working primarily with video, printed material and sculptures, Baris Dogrusoz’s work engages the circulation, protocols and function of scenarios and historical narratives in the context of “siege culture”, including “Fortress Europe”, the US/Mexico border policy, the Israeli occupation in Palestine, reframing these as tools for critical insights and analysis.

Theater of Operations is composed of two immersive environments that envisage the archaeological site of Europos Dura in Syria as a proto-fictional place where two different operations on matter, namely aggregating and digging, can be seen as acts of creation toward two potentially resistive architectural typologies: the barricade and the tunnel.

The ancient city of Europos Dura had much in common with today’s most cosmopolitan urban landscapes. Religious, linguistic, and cultural diversity characterized much of the city’s life for more than 500 years, starting at the outset of the 3rd century B.C. and located in what is now Syria. The first archeological excavations of Europos Dura took place in the 1920s during the western military and colonial presence in the region. Funded by American oil money, the excavations were often employed as instruments of soft cultural power and left a legacy for the interpretation of archeology in the collective imaginary.

In Sand Storm and the Oblivion (2017), the artist reexamines the literal undermining of walls in a two-channel installation about the ancient multicultural fortified city by looking at satellite imagery, archeological reports from French and American archeological missions in the region, and recent events.

In the newly commissioned installation, Beneath Crowded Skies (2019), the artist establishes a triangulation between the legacy of the Europos Dura excavation, the mapping of military actions in the region during the last decade, and the presence of fighters.

Theater of Operations is Baris Dogrusoz’s first solo show in Lebanon.

Courtesy of Sursock Museum.

“The Thousand and One Nights” the first inaugural show of its kind in Beirut. Conceived and curated by Maria Brito , the exhibition is comprised of seven American contemporary artists who will make their own interpretations of the famous most important and relevant pieces of literature of the Middle- East “The Thousand and One Nights”.
The show will be held on March 15th, 2019 and running till May 3rd, 2019.

The artists we collaborated with for this group show are: Rosson Crow, Allison Zuckerman, Holly Coulis, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, Jonathan Chapline, Monica Kim Garza, and Canyon Castator

Courtesy of Artual Gallery

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde is proud to present Blue, Hassan Sharif’s third solo show at the gallery, focusing on the late artist’s highly individualistic approach to colour. Spanning multiple bodies of work—paintings, Objects, Boxes, Experiments and even Semi-System-like pieces—Blue reveals how Sharif’s almost irreverent engagement with colour exemplifies his entire philosophy of art-making. A tireless experimenter who pushed the limits of his own exploration, Sharif deployed a double-barrelled strategy with colour—both subverting and elevating it. Shifting, morphing, sabotaged or framed for the viewer to ponder, colour is a “red thread” weaving across four decades of work. By considering Sharif’s practice through the specific prism of colour, Blue prompts us to re-examine the complexity of Sharif’s vision, providing a closer look at some of the impulses and contradictions that shaped it.

Courtesy of Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde

The subject is absent in the works of Hyung Koo Kang, a renowned hyperrealist artist. Rather than merely depicting famous celebrities in the picture, he combines it with contemporary images like film, and reinvents the subject with exquisite craftsmanship using all kinds of possible tools with his painting, such as airbrush technique, nails, drill, q-tips, toothpicks and erasers.

In order to actualize a subject that doesn’t exist, Kang expresses the potential and possible realities in a hyperrealistic manner, rather than merely unveiling reality as it is. The figures of the past that are recreated through his hands into contemporary images pierce the viewer with a tactile gaze, exchanging that gaze with the audience, forming emotional bonds secretly.

Courtesy of Anima Gallery.

Fann A Porter gallery is pleased to invite you to the opening reception of Subconscious Reality, the second solo exhibition by Houssam Ballan, tomorrow, 25 March, 7 pm to 10 pm.

Subconscious Reality explores the society and persons in the midst of conflict, and the alternate realities these situations can create. Ballan creates works that tell a story, one that seems to carry multiple narratives. Perhaps a painting boasts life and energy, or at the same time holds some form of hope of an escape. The artist’s figures are minimalistic, rounded, and purposefully lacking detail, resembling icons, giving a timeless frame to the works. This timelessness makes Ballan’s works relevant in the past, the present and the future.

Ballan’s focus on human interactions continues to play a big role in his new works. The figures are painted caught in everyday life moments, yet these moments feel both intimate and relatable at the same time. In his painting, Two Dancers, the sense of hope – or the hope of hope – is gently portrayed to the viewer, with his use of reduced detail, colour, and soft lines. Though, seeming to exist in dreamland, his hopeful paintings are strongly relatable and very much rooted in reality. The emotion found in the characters’ eyes – through the use of flat colour combined with the sense of continuous movement – creates moving, poetic portraits.

The works also touch upon one’s own perception of self, physical perception and the issues we face today with body image. The beautiful figures embody all the notions of self-love and put to shame all the unrealistic social norms of beauty.

Courtesy of Fann A Porter gallery

Safaa Erruas work explores ideas of the body and borders through the meditative abstraction of visceral objects. In order to navigate notions of visibility through materiality, the artist often creates a contrast between soft (cotton, paper, skin) and sharp (needles, wire, glass). This new body of work, for her first solo exhibition in the UK at 50 Golborne Gallery, focuses on how to place home in a state of migratory flux. Erruas’s meticulously delicate yet resilient pieces imagine skin as both a geographical border and symbolic barrier between our internal and external worlds. Memories are distilled into soft ruptures – itinerant movements into sharp meditations. In this search for belonging, Erruas creates physical manifestations of home where the inside goes out, individual collides with collective, and topographical gestures become intimate, narrative layers.

Courtesy of 50 Golborne Gallery

Mark Hachem Gallery – Beirut is delighted to present “Suspension of Disbelief”, a solo exhibition by artist Ghazi Baker, featuring a selection of his most recent works.

Growing up, Baker was amazed by what he saw in films, fascinated by the ability to pursue the viewer in believing a story line, from Superman to Star Wars and even romantic films.
Later in life, this fascination turned into a philosophical pursuit, a journey of discovery and research to find what really makes the viewer accept the premise of a film.

Suspension of disbelief is an essential ingredient for any kind of storytelling. With any film, the viewer has to ignore the reality that they are viewing a staged performance and temporarily accept it as their reality in order to be entertained. Black and white films provide an obvious early example that audiences are willing to suspend disbelief, no matter how implausible the images appear, for the sake of entertainment. With the exception of totally color-blind people (achromats), no person viewing these films sees the real world without color, but some are still willing to suspend disbelief and accept the images in order to be entertained. Suspension of disbelief is also supposed to be essential for the enjoyment of many films and television shows involving complex stunts, special effects, and seemingly unrealistic plots and characterizations.

As an audience, the psychological effort required to enter this state of arrested disbelief seems innate and effortless. As an art, Baker wanted to experiment with the aesthetics of painting surreal and sometimes grotesque characters to see if the viewer would be willing to suspend disbelief and convince himself that he/she is looking at actual audience members watching a specific movie and reacting to it.

Through his exhibition ‘Suspension of Disbelief’, Ghazi Baker divides his work into two symbiotic elements, the transmitter and the receiver, the movie and the viewer and in the case of his paintings, the painted audience becomes the transmitter to the viewer of the painting, attempting to introduce the viewer as a new entity willing to possibly suspend their disbelief while looking at the paintings.

Courtesy of Mark Hachem Gallery – Beirut

We are delighted to invite you on Thursday March 28 starting 7 pm to the opening of the exhibition “Variable Identities”, Sandor Bartha’s second solo-show at Ivan Gallery.

The artistic practice of Sandor Bartha (b. 1962, Odorheiu-Secuiesc, Romania) conveys personal messages with a political, ironical twist on the current state of things on a national or international level, through playful, clever and skilful strategies. His works combine different media, such as drawing, painting, installation or photography, more than often integrating common, insignificant or recycled materials, scraps and objects. His projects have been shown in the Prague Biennial (2003), in the Romanian Pavilion at The Venice Biennale (2001) and in exhibitions at the Ludwig Museum (Budapest, 2003), Kulturkontakt (Vienna, 1997 with an adjacent artistic residency program). In 2006 he was granted a residency in Hamburg by the Hamburg Kulturbehörde and in 2002 he received a grant from the ECF (European Cultural Foundation) inside the ID (Intercultural Dialogue) residency-program Kassel. He teaches at the Faculty of Arts of the University in Oradea, Romania. He lives and works in Budapest, Hungary.

The exhibition can be visited until 11 May 2019, Wednesday to Saturday, 12-18, or by appointment outside the visiting hours.

Courtesy of Ivan Gallery

We are delighted to announce the first solo exhibition by British painter Ivan Seal at the gallery. Always painting from his mind, never from an object or image, Seal sets to work the imagination’s triumvirate of improvisation, invention and memory producing paintings at once flat and three-dimensional, realistic and yet like nothing ever seen before.

Set up in the style of still lives on pedestals, or on an indefinite but realistic ground, represented objects often appear unfinished, conveying a sense of ‘in the making’, while single strokes of paint float free from representation, or the ‘clay’ has not ‘yet’ been completely worked out to define an object. These shapes emerge from his recollections or stories, often carrying childhood memories, like for example the porcelain figurines that populated the home of his parents, which he used as toys to represent complex plays. Such memories also continually shift in balance or tension between the worlds of his father, who was a butcher, and his mother, a ballet dancer. It’s an iconography the artist has evolved over time in which paint slips disconcertingly from tool to subject matter, becoming embodiments of psychological reckoning; a physical expression of the gunk of memory through which each of us fashion our worlds. Paint is many things in his work; but it is also just paint, laid on a canvas, as bold, dumb and brilliant as that permits.

In this exhibition Ivan Seal asked the gallerist to select paintings from the years 2012 to 2018 and then made what he calls associative reaction paintings, thus creating a dialogue and making the reflection about the possibilities of improvisation/creation/painting even more complex. Some of the older works represent ceramic figurines of the Italian Commedia dell’ Arte as well as abstracted versions of flower bouquets and rocks. The new paintings tend to be more abstracted and wild, quoting the earlier objects but morphing them into distorted and sometimes comical forms. “Thus the understanding of maker and provider, author and interpreter is toyed with creating a game in which one controls the start whilst the other states the end. A game or a play needs a stage and here the stage is set within opaque background and vague foregrounds ruptured by the presented offering of an object. Even when shifting ever so close to figurative characters the thing remains a thing. Actors and props exist as objects to mobilize into the analytical relationship between sense and nonsense. This is also apparent in how each object relates to proximity partner and the sequential properties of the selections overall narrative.”

Courtesy of  Galleria Monica De Cardenas

Al Rabi’a is an experimental, process-led space by visual artist, Shaikha Al Ketbi.

Featuring walls lined with static and moving paintings depicting scenes from the artist’s dreams juxtaposed with fabricated recollections, Al Ketbi will continue to populate the space over a period of two months with additional paintings, furniture pieces and sculptures. Through this work, she explores themes of impostorism while excavating hidden truths within her own narrative in the context of mental health.

The space will be further activated in collaboration with other members of the Warehouse421 creative community, becoming the ephemeral epicenter for an eclectic program of experiences, workshops, discussions and events.

Shaikha Al Ketbi has her own contemporary art practice, with photography, drawing and installation as her main mediums, and her work has been shown locally and internationally. She is an alumna of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship.

Courtesy of Warehouse 421

Forum Gallery presents Natural History, an exhibition of paintings by Robert Bauer, Linden Frederick, Alan Magee, Alyssa Monks, Guillermo Muñoz Vera, Brian Rutenberg and Stephanie Wilde. United by their interest in the complex and multi-layered content inherent in the objective imagery of their individual pasts, each artist uses paint and canvas in a very different, and very compelling way.

Robert Bauer uses the language of portrait and landscape to convey the essential, emotional response he has to past and present. The objectivity of observation unites with the sensitivity of expression in his highly developed and palpably personal paintings and drawings.

Linden Frederick paints the iconic buildings of his upstate New York, small-town upbringing. Tinged with nostalgia but always based in clear, concise reality, the paintings, while specific, seem to bring each viewer to his own memory and association.

Alan Magee creates poetic compositions from natural and man-made objects whose history, in his hands, is palpable. Beginning with the premise that everything is what it seems and not what it seems, Magee spins his subjects into seemingly simple, marvelously complex, peaceful, contemplative paintings.

Alyssa Monks places her sumptuous figures in the natural world, often combining the verdant landscapes of her memory with the human body, hers and others. The result is a harmonious integration of man and environment.

Guillermo Muñoz Vera examines the world around him from the standpoint of his own history as a Chilean born, naturalized Spaniard in terms of a larger study of human cultural and geopolitical history and its impact on our world today.

Brian Rutenberg blends the colors and forms of the landscape of his native coastal Carolina with the excitement and passion of action-packed abstraction; the resulting image is uniquely his.

Stephanie Wilde, who remains dedicated to environmental imperatives in her self-taught practice, illuminates the inexorable role of nature to inspire woman’s pursuit of progress in her meticulous and fascinating mixed media works.

Courtesy of Forum Gallery

We are delighted to announce the opening of the first Solo Exhibition by talented young Artist ASMAA ELNAWAWY (b.1981) Titled : MYTHOLOGY, featuring her latest Neo Realism paintings inspired by Egyptian mythology such ‘Paper dolls & white Magic’, life, and nature, in a divine composition that motivated her strong and sincere blend of colors that enriches the expressionism of her innovations.

Artist Statement | The Mythology of paper dolls & their white Magic.

Paper Dolls are used in one of our Egyptians traditional spiritual ceremonies and practices, related to ancient beliefs. It’s more like white magic. The paper doll purpose was to prevent the envy eyes. When I searched for the symbolic meaning of the paper doll in Egyptian society; I found that it refer to continuity of life. These group of paintings are based on the cumulatively symbols idea, where the paintings consist a group of symbols. In order to solve the mystery of every painting you need to know the meaning of each symbol and ornament.

In each painting there is a group of figures interacting with the Paper dolls, and surrounded with number of symbols and ornaments. One of these symbols is the wild bird, which belong to the Persian Islamic culture. These wild birds are symbol of the difficulties human beings face in life. The plant ornament is another symbol can be found in the paintings. They refer to all the people and things which look appealing, but they are harmful. That is because this plant ornament, which also belongs to the Persian culture, is a harmful plant. The last symbol can be found in the paintings is the maze, which is a symbol of life. In my opinion, life is more or less like a maze. It seems difficult to face all its challenges without losing hope, but finding a purpose for your life would help you in achieving a reason to live. So finally, so guarding your old paper doll can be a purpose of living.

Courtesy of  Al Masar Gallery

“IRREVERENT” is the show that approaches the struggle of artists to consider art as a “verb” without repression by bigotry, politics or any kind of insinuation and presumption.

IRREVERENT combines three great artists: Nathalie De Zan, galant and dauntless, master in digital arts and multimedia/internet programmer, her digital brush strokes donate a
sensual – surrealistic homily between photography and her self- exposure to create a temple of freedom; Joe Wax, a well known audacious commentator, painter, print maker and attorney whose art is full of pervasive ambivalence that is focused on the meaninglessness and incongruity of life in the actual consumer culture; Bryan Rackleff, the dynamic and perceptive painter, whose work has foundation in graphic design, with a combination between traditional painting technique and the current contemporary subject matters that stand for his subversion of socio-normativity.

Courtesy of Novado Gallery

Fann A Porter gallery is pleased to invite you to the opening reception of Gusts of Wind, the first solo exhibition by Shereen Shalhoub, on Sunday, 21 April, 7 pm, featuring a of experimental sculptural clay works.

Many pieces in the exhibition reveal varying perceptions of bird’s wings, which the artist is using as a symbol for human experience. In some, the visible details of feathers are clear and others are more abstract and fluid, a result achieved through piping. The free-flowing forms are made by piping clay as slip – a medium used for molding and casting the material. The sculptures have an imperfect finish reflecting the heart of the exhibition’s concept, which Shalhoub has based around a biological function of a bird’s wing. A bird has the ability to morph and change the shape of its wings to respond to its circumstances. They twist through a range of shapes, angles and asymmetries in a natural and constant metamorphosis. Here, Shalhoub has taken wings as a representation of inner truth. Her main focus was to raise a question; “if our true essence is to be flawless to be considered perfect, then how do we push through our own gusts of wind without any struggles?”

Some of the sculptures combine the piping technique with dripped wax from candles, which, for Shalhoub is a metaphor for these layers. Each of us is made of many different experiences and these make us more resilient. Here, then, the artist is aiming to show that we too must adapt and also rail against the social perception of perfection.

“In this exhibition, I am portraying the message that life experiences that are continuously reshaping us and that we are on a constant journey. We are made of layers of experiences and at the center of it is a core being, my work investigates this core and, in some cases, reveals it,” says the artist.

Courtesy of  Fann A Porter gallery

Sara Kay Gallery is pleased to present Neel / Picasso, on view from April 30 through July 20. The exhibition will feature significant portraits from private collections by the artists Alice Neel (1900-1984) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).

Neel and Picasso were contemporaries who transformed and revitalized portraiture in the 20th century. For the first time, their works will be shown side-by-side. The exhibition will explore the artists’ internal landscapes, the relationships with their subjects, and exemplifies the development of modern portraiture.

Neel, a self-described “painter of people,” chose not to idealize her subjects. Instead, with bold strokes, an imaginative line between the interior experience and the outward appearance of the sitter is revealed.

In her portrait of Lida Moser from 1962, Neel focuses on facial expression, body language and clothing, illustrating the overlapping of inner essence and outward appearance, of vanity and vulnerability. Painted by her artist friend during the rise of the feminist movement, Moser was an accomplished photojournalist at a time when women were a rarity in the field. Moser is an unmistakably dynamic figure. Painted in lucid tones with fingers jutting out like spindles, her form is magnetic and commanding.

In juxtaposition to Neel’s probing of the space between the inner and outer life, Picasso reconfigures his subject’s features revealing his own interpretation of their essence, inadvertently serving as a barometer for his own emotional state.

Painted in 1937, Femme au béret orange et au col de fourrure depicts the artist’s young mistress and muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Here, the formal experimentation and emotional intensity that characterize his most celebrated portraits of women are embodied. The small group of portraits that he painted on 4 December 1937, the present work included, make it almost possible to track the slow transition from his relationships with Marie-Thérèse Walter to Dora Maar, and reflects the artist’s conflicted feelings surrounding this transition.

The final two works of the presentation highlight a shared acknowledgement of the artists’ own mortality, as both turn their gazes inward. Picasso, in Homme assis les bras croisés II from 1964, portrays an energetic vibrant sitter, unlike a man of Picasso’s age, though the features are unmistakably those of the artist. In 107th and Broadway, Neel offers an anthropomorphic view of her final home painted as a portent with dark shadows nefariously playing across the surface of the canvas. She described the large shadow that engulfs the building’s facade as the “shadow of death.”

Picasso said that his work acted as a “sort of a diary.” Neel claimed she was “a collector of souls…” capturing “what the world has done [to her sitters] and their retaliation.” Linked in time, differing in approach, these two artists were equal masters whose innovative methods radicalized and transformed the art of portraiture.

Courtesy of  Sara Kay Gallery