Agenda

After long weeks of lockdown, Sfeir Semler Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition at their Hamburg gallery. Curated by Ana Siler, the exhibition WHERE THE LEMONS BLOOM… brings together works by Etel Adnan, Moritz Altmann, Yto Barrada, Bettina, William Kentridge, Timo Nasseri, Ania Soliman, Christine Streuli and Akram Zaatari. “Know’st thou the land where the lemon-trees bloom” is a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that speaks of longing for heavenly distant lands: The South, the sun and light, Mediterranean flora, bright white buildings, marble, music, laughter and joy. Goethe’s romantic contemplation echoes into our present, lending its title to Christine Streuli’s series of drawings based on advertisement billboards she saw during a recent stay in Hawaii.

Courtesy of Sfeir Semler Gallery

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present the first major survey of Jack Whitten’s works on paper, spanning the artist’s six decade career. Jack Whitten (1939 – 2018) made it his mission to disrupt the discipline of art history through experiments with material, process, and technique. He effectively constructed a bridge between gestural abstraction and process art, constantly working toward a nuanced language of painting that employs deeply personal expression. Whitten was also a prolific and powerful draughtsman. The unique body of works on view at Hauser & Wirth testifies to the immensity of his commitment to drawing as a means to make manifest his ideas and advance his methods.

Jack Whitten. Transitional Space. A Drawing Survey spotlights the artist’s playfulness and improvisational skill in searching for his own special visual language. Paper was more than an effective medium for Whitten; for him, working on paper was akin to scientific research. With an aesthetic hypothesis in mind, he worked tirelessly on paper to both subvert and elevate the history of art and how best to represent the many layers of information packed inside his imagination

Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

The exhibition focuses on Albanian socialist realism through painting, poster and drawings, and it offers a selection of artworks produced under the dictatorship that aimed to spread socialism’s main principles among the proletarian.

Curated by Artan Shabani, the exhibition investigates the impact of the communist ideology on Albanian visual arts during the second half of the 20th century. The selected artworks reflect the ideology that played an important role in the works’ dogmatic content. The exhibition offers an opportunity to become familiar with the culture and identity of Albanian people who had been isolated from the rest of the world for a long time, and centers around the daily life, working class, portraits of leadership, representations of the regime and a hopeful approach to upcoming generations.

Courtesy of Pera Museum.

Focusing on contemporary approaches to miniature painting, the exhibition brings together the works of 14 artists from different countries such as Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan. The artists do not treat miniature solely as a historical object, they emphasise its theoretical potential as a contemporary art form. Using various forms such as sculpture, video, photography, and installation, they bring out miniature from books, where it has resided for centuries, give it a new dimension, and search for ways in which miniature can live in the contemporary world.

Contemporary miniature goes beyond its former context in terms of form and content, and it focuses on issues such as colonialism, orientalism, economic inequality, gender, politics of identity, discrimination, social violence, compulsory migration, and representation. The exhibition emphasises the artists’ various approaches to traditional miniature, as well as revealing the commonalities between them.

Curated by Azra Tüzünoğlu and Gülce Özkara, the exhibition features work by Hamra Abbas, Rashad Alakbarov, Halil Altındere, Dana Awartani, Fereydoun Ave, CANAN, Noor Ali Chagani, Cansu Çakar, Hayv Kahraman, Imran Qureshi, Nilima Sheikh, Shahpour Pouyan, Shahzia Sikander and Saira Wasim.

Courtesy of Pera Museum

Into the Now is a body of work that was put together during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The center piece of the exhibition is a digitised 7’21’ Super-8 film titled Brown Bag.
The title refers to a brown paper bag filled with exposed Super-8 film cassettes that I found in my studio unpacking some long-forgotten boxes.
I sent the film out to be developed and digitised. When the material returned it turned out to be mostly skate footage from the mid-90’s in New York. The film had sat in that bag almost 25 years, a true time capsule. I sat down with the footage and edited this film.

Also in the show are a series of 14 vintage prints taken in New York in the 80’s and early 90’s, these include images of Spike Lee on the set of Do the Right Thing, and Public Enemy lead man Chuck D in the recording studio.
The most recent work is a recto/verso edition covering the past year, including the doctor who administered my Covid-19 test, my sons and stepdaughter, several up and coming hip hop artists and others.

I have been thinking a lot about living in America during a global pandemic that has simultaneously exposed failure of the health system as well as exposing the blatant racism and white supremacist brutality the US suffers from. These are questions I have long grappled with as an “outsider”. As an artist I often found myself spending time listening and talking to important Black artists, musicians and leaders over the decades.

I think back from when I was a young child and remembered the day Martin Luther King was murdered, the day I saw Tommie Smith and John Carlos bow their heads and raise their black-gloved fists. I was 11 then, now I am 63 and I wonder when will this violence end?

— Ari Marcopoulos

Courtesy of galerie frank elbaz

A riot of flowers with jarring colours and harsh angles dominates the forefront, at other times they take a backstage to blue, green, and grey hues, depending on the time of the year or the day the scenes were observed.

Surprisingly, Silent Garden was not inspired during the COVID-19 pandemic when isolation became central to humans, and when people started looking inwards for refuge. The series is the result of a few years’ work, simulating the artist’s life and stemming from his own sense of isolation. “I feel that I’m stranger on so many levels, especially on the political level, like everyone else. I have no say in issues that affect my life and existence on this land, and as time passes, I feel more helpless and isolated.” Frustrated and unable to make a change or blend in, Bashar Alhroub made his garden with its exotic plants the center of his attention not only by attending to it but also by painting the new blossoming flowers, the various plants, and the diverse combination of colors throughout the seasons. Using acrylic and coal on canvas, Bashar produced a set of artworks that has roots in impressionism, reminding us of works by Monet and Rousseau.

We can see similarities between the flowers, exotic in nature, and the alienation that the artist feels as he tries to adapt to his surroundings. Looking at the perspective of the paintings, we see these similarities when the artist places himself on par with the plants in the visual sense. In front of the big canvas, we are overwhelmed with the dominant tall plants and can sense a conversation between them and the artist, as if the plants have turned into his intimate soul mates.

Ultimately, Bashar’s Silent Garden transforms into a healing escape rather than a physical reality. It becomes a sanctuary that provides therapy to the stranger in Bashar’s soul, bringing about the peace and tranquility that he strives for in pursuit of his inner reality away from the outside world.

A secret garden can only be accessed through a secret door, and in this exhibition, Bashar opens the door, letting us into his secret wordless world, revealing the intimate, secluded personal journey of the past few years.

Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery

Sabrina Amrani is pleased to present Señal de Abandono, the first solo exhibition by Jorge Tacla in the gallery, for Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend.

Like much of Tacla’s work, his paintings represent a space of social rupture. These works situate themselves in the joints of a new architecture that arises in the wake of catastrophe—natural or man-made. Tacla perceives the devastation that results from such events as an opportunity to investigate structural systems that would otherwise remain unseen. To signify such unsettled worlds, he uses pictorial languages that are obsessive: sometimes repeating the images, sometimes repeating the same gesture in the same space many times until the visual register is analogous to the trauma that prompts it. Tacla Illuminates the variability of identity for victim and aggressor -an agent who is disassociated from his or her own identity- and the complexity of the assessment of guilt. These critical issues, and their situation in the larger, collective human experience, are the defining theoretical inquiries of Tacla’s work.

Faced with this selection of Tacla’s work, the viewer could experience the same fascination that overwhelms when in front of an abandoned building, a forgotten civilisation, the image of what was inhabited, full of life and is now just History. But it is a naked History, already devoid of the humanity that created it.

And if there is something human, it represents the brutal desolation that follows the conflict. Nor has the beauty of nature returned to take possession of the ruin and recover the conquered territory. Señal de Abandono seems to replicate an x-ray in which time has been suspended in a devastated reality that hints at a past, but not the future. And if there is a future to be seen, it is not very optimistic: when the Oklahoma City Federal building was attacked in 1995, images came all together to the artist’s mind: the earthquakes in Chile, the bombing of La Moneda in Santiago, the wars in the Middle East, the Lebanese civil war, the occupation of Beirut, the massacres of Palestine in 1982. “At that moment, the idea that this is just the beginning came also to me immediately, this is what we will be seeing more and more from now on” he predicted. And so it was, perhaps not because Tacla’s skills as a fortune teller, but because it is part of a dark side of human nature and a History that does nothing but repeat itself: later we saw the Twin Towers fall, attacks in Europe, more desolation in the Middle East.

Tacla’s work encloses the magnetism of a frozen moment within History. Or perhaps post-History, because it represents the moments of a recently devastated civilisation. Something inside the spectator plays with the feelings of nostalgia and the seduction of the devastated, of a spell of extinction and horror, “the sublime of the images, without ceasing to see their horror,” sums up the artist. Tacla brings with his paintings the same affliction that seized him after seeing the effects of the devastating earthquake in Chile in 1985: “It feels like a kind – which is the opposite to gravity? – of vertigo,” he explains in an interview with Laurence Weschler. Not surprisingly, Tacla has been defined as the painter of destruction.

The truth is within his work, we observe the traces of the artist’s own history, traces of the history of humanity. His grandparents emigrated from Palestine and Syria at the same time as large numbers of Arab emigrants as a consequence of the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The artist’s youth was also spent at a turbulent moment in the history of Chile, with the rise of communism and the coup d’état of General Pinochet. Tacla could see the effects of the La Moneda bombardment and his own career suffered a slight detour when the conservatory where he studied Music closed. This is how he ended up studying painting and also emigrating at the same time, to New York, and how the artist probably began to form those images of devastation, evoking in turn a memory of his own roots: “my previous history could have made me more receptive to future implications ”, explains the artist. But Tacla sees the ruins, the demolished facades, the shaky structures, as a symbol: “Ruined buildings also contain, for example, intimate scenes, since individual bodies can also be destroyed.” Tacla tries to open a space for reflection, to slow down and perhaps to establish a dialogue about the instability of the world: “everything is constantly moving and destroying itself,” he clarifies. But it is also a criticism and it is that the world “feels as if we were always at war,” he confesses. The artist is interested in representing the exterior, but also the interior, as we can see in Señal de Abandono. And for this, nothing like the gutted buildings in which the interior itself goes out.

Courtesy of Sabrina Amrani.

Between Empires, Beyond Borders delves into the memories of the Köpe family, who witnessed Ottoman Empire’s modernisation period as well as its withdrawal from the world stage. The visual narrative of the exhibition is based on detailed archival records spanning the Second Constitutional Era, the First World War and the Armistice Period that followed. Carefully preserved personal documents of the family members, whose lives took shape across Brassó, Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Edirne and Konya, shed light on the milestones of political, social and diplomatic history.

The family’s story begins in the Tansimat era, a period of Westernising reforms in the Empire, when the roads of Andras Köpe and Léocadie Tallibart intersect in Istanbul. Born and raised in a village near the city of Brassó, Andras had fled to the Ottoman capital from the pressures of the Austrian Empire. Léocadie, whose family was from Brittany, was in the city accompanying her two brothers; Louis, a watchmaker and jeweler, and Pierre, an architect. The couple married in 1842. The exhibition includes the letters of their second child, Charles, who in turn married Rose-Marie Marcopoli, in 1882. Coming from a Levantine family of Genoese origin in Trabzon, Rose-Marie had six children with Charles: Charlotte, Ida, Taïb, Ferdinand, Antoine and Eugène.
Educated in French, the six siblings never became Ottoman subjects and remained citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Taïb went to Brassó a little after the beginning of the war in 1914 and joined the military of the dual monarchy. Antoine followed in his brother’s footsteps and enlisted two years later in Istanbul, serving in Syria and Palestine in 1917. When the war ended and both empires entered respective stages of dissolution, the majority of the Köpe family members stayed in Istanbul, and witnessed the Armistice of Mudros in 1918, the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, as well as the occupation of the city by the British, French and Italian military officials in 1920.
As multicultural members of a multi-ethnic empire, the lives of the Köpe family and the documents they left behind testify to a moment in time when subjecthood and citizenship were not categorised within stable definitions of nationhood. Through Antoine’s memoirs, volumes of cartoons as well as visual and audio recordings, in addition to a selection from hundreds of photographs taken by his brother Taïb, Between Empires, Beyond Borders explores how the diplomatic relations between the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman empires manifested in everyday life. Built on a family history as it moves from the 19th to the 20th century, the exhibition draws attention to the mutability of identities, the mobility of lives, and the uncertainty of borders in the transition from empire to nation-state.

Developed by Nefin Dinç (James Madison University), Erol Ülker (Işık University) and Lorans Tanatar Baruh (SALT), the exhibition is supported by the Hungarian Cultural Center in Istanbul.

Courtesy of SALT Beyoğlu

Beginning Tuesday, September 15th, Fort Gansevoort will present ‘Interiors,’ an online exhibition of drawings spanning the career of Gayleen Aiken (1934-2005), organized with artist Laurie Simmons. ‘Interiors’ focuses specifically upon Aiken’s drawings, which depict domestic scenes teeming with juvenile revelry and mischief. Although Aiken was not known to be mischievous herself, the artist’s deeper rebellious nature is revealed through the actions and expressions of her adolescent proxies. Never deferential, the Raimbilli Cousins are shown consistently reacting to situations with exuberant disobedience, defying the customary strictures placed upon children’s conduct. With its charming details and lively mien, Aiken’s oeuvre nevertheless also suggests that ominous undercurrents course through American rural life and small town communities. Her images convey an undeniable tension beneath the surface of Vermont’s sylvan landscape. Several drawings on view in ‘Interiors’ are explained by the artist’s hand-written musings, which contextualize the events taking place in her deceptively conventional, truly mythical world.

Some of the defining elements characteristic of American folk-art traditions are on view in Aiken’s portrayal of familial aesthetics. Here we see lovingly rendered depictions of furniture, clothing, and the accoutrement of special holiday celebrations familiar in the America of Aiken’s youth. Through these images, the artist has constructed a concurrent reality that can be understood as a documentary record of our complex human relationships to memory, nostalgia, and fantasy.

The visual vocabulary of Gayleen Aiken’s art finds fascinating parallels in the work of acclaimed contemporary photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons. Simmons holds a personal connection to the work on view, stating that it is reminiscent of her “childhood crayon drawings of girls in interiors.” She describes Aiken’s “invented world” as “both joyous and dark, fanciful and hyper real,” while also likening it to the artistic practice of Aline Kominski Crumb, Hollis Siegler, Morton Bartlett, Karen Yassinsky, Henry Darger, and Doris Lee. Both Aiken and Simmons present to the viewer an uncanny representation of the mundane that, upon examination, is equally critical and playful, raising questions about morality and conformity within suburban and rural life. ‘Interiors’ features brief meditations by Simmons upon specific selected works on view, exploring, from the perspective of a fellow traveler across time and art, the special resonances in Aiken’s work for a contemporary audience.

Courtesy of Fort Gansevoort.

Leila Heller is pleased to announce, Gaze and Glance, an exhibition of new paintings by Iranian- American artist, Bahar Sabzevari, opening on Thursday, September 17th, 2020 and on view through Wednesday, October 14th, 2020 in New York.

Sabzevari’s self-portraits are deliberate and layered, focusing on themes of identity and nostalgia. The artist goes through a technical process of studying Persian mythology, paired with a curiosity for wildlife and animal documentaries resulting in a fusion of themes to create her version of a Persian-wonderland. Prior to painting, Sabzevari conducts a disciplined approach with her creative application. She creates preliminary sketches and then assembles a combination of models and maquettes of the creatures that come to mind. This varying relationship between contemporary culture and art history allows the artist the freedom and conceptual range to arrange her own reality on canvas, wood or linen.

Her self-portraits represent a visual diary of nonverbal record, seeking to convey her identity, beliefs, values, state of mind, and experiences as a woman in Iran. The paintings are emotive, through the eyes, color palette and suspended playfulness around the woman’s crown. Inspired by her love for animals, dream reflections and cultural heritage, her canvases grapple with presenting her personal self-image and self-expression within an age where social media largely skews the public perceptions of the individual.

In Gaze and Glance, Sabzevari considers the importance of the gaze. She simultaneously invites the viewer to observe her and be observed by her, provoking the questions; “Who is the object?” and “Who is the subject?”. Sabzevari notes, “I like when the communication between the two gazes blurs the boundaries between the two roles until it becomes unclear who exactly is gazing at whom…I follow [the viewer] everywhere around the room and I ask them to do the same…challenging them by blurring the lines between subject and object, real and unreal, being seductive, or showing a powerful woman, or both at the same time.”

Courtesy of Leila Heller Gallery

Gods of the Frontier by Clara Carvajal, will be on view from September 24 to November 26. The exhibition delves deep into Lebanon’s visual memory through the archives of three important photography collections from that country.

During the first quarter of 2019, Clara Carvajal investigated the photographic archives of three important photography collections in Beirut: the Arab Image Foundation, the archives of the newspaper An-Nahar and the collection of photographer Emile Boulos Divers. The project, rather than focusing on major themes like the war and historical events in Lebanon, attempts to explore the way in which the country’s society has been portrayed since it gained independence from France in the 1940’s, and up to the time when the civil war broke out in 1975.

The photographic images that have been selected contain portraits of individuals and may be examined through a symbolic lens based on the social archetypes they represent at a historical moment within the country’s society. Through these images, Clara Carvajal has created a collection of wood engravings that she uses to delve deeper into her iconography, along with a publication that describes the key parts of the process she has sought to follow. She thus reveals what the images show beyond their own formalism. This publication was created with the cooperation of Teo Millán, in terms of authoring the texts, and Clara Sancho, who created the design and layout.

Each of these images is the object-subject on which an analysis of the imaginary of the country’s collective identity is based. Individuals who take on revealing poses in the photographer’s presence, whose intentionality both consciously and unconsciously bears witness to the world which they inhabit, in the way that they interpret it: the happy girl surrounded by her family, the sensual couple in love strolling by the sea, the male body as a divine icon, the father proud of his child, the savior, the caregiver, and so on.

Courtesy of Casa Árabe.

In this latest installment of the ongoing series of exhibitions focused on printmaking in the Arab world, Meem Gallery presents over 40 editioned works created by Marwan between 1967 and 1999.

Internationally celebrated as a master painter, Marwan (1934-2016) also engaged in a less well known but equally accomplished printmaking practice throughout his career. Born in Damascus in 1934, the artist permanently moved to Berlin in 1957 where his exposure to Art Informel and the German Neo Expressionist movements led to the development of his highly distinctive style.

Installing a French printing press in his studio, Marwan’s printmaking developed simultaneously with his painting practice. Masterfully harnessing the complex chemistry and technical processes associated with the medium of etching, the artist skillfully incorporated his signature painterly effects into his printed works.

The earliest works in this exhibition demonstrate Marwan’s initial focus on the human body. Monochromatic studies of stylised, contorted figures, including Der Unverdeckte, a set of six etchings made in 1969, undoubtedly demonstrate the influence of the New Figuration movement on the young artist. The 1970s saw Marwan increasingly focus on the head/ face, soon becoming the subject matter that he would become most renowned for, as evidenced in the many works in this exhibition. Revealing rich topographies of spontaneous, raw expression, these works, generally referred to as the artist’s Kopf or ‘face’ landscapes, poignantly manifest the varied experiences of the joys and hardships of life by utilising the rich contours of the human face.

Notable developments in themes, techniques and use of colour can be witnessed in the artist’s work during a year spent in Paris, in 1973. Marwan’s faces started to transform, gaining new depths from the increased emphasis of wrinkles and crevices. Vivid colours accentuate the works, lending a heightened vibrancy to his characterful subjects.

Besides Marwan’s well-known figures and faces, this exhibition also presents several rare examples of his still lifes. Tables laden with fruit and crockery are rendered in the same sketchy, expressionistic manner as his human subjects, similarly transforming the banal subject matter into complex existential studies.

Brought together for the first time, and created in parallel with his paintings, the works in this exhibition not only showcase the prolific scope of Marwan’s little-known printmaking practice, but additionally display his mastery of the notoriously complex process of etching.

Courtesy of Meem Gallery

Carbon 12 is delighted to announce Philip Mueller’s solo exhibition.

In the summer of 2017, the notorious Black Flamingo Sad Boys emerged from dark, woodsy pastures, to abandon the confines of their Alpine environment for the bleached sand and enticing turquoise pools of former prison-island, Santo Stefano. All inhibition was relinquished, and a seemingly endless summer was birthed in the ruminations of Philip Mueller (b.1988, Austria) where the gang established a new haven in the anti-beach resort, Beach Resort Tiberio. Knowing no home nor respite, the gang saw fit to indulge their hedonistic desires at their seemingly newfound paradise – from racing 60’s, 70’s and 80’s cult car classics, to retiring to the languorous way of life the anti-beach resort implores.

As creator of his intricate universe, Philip Mueller conceives a timely conclusion to the resort series in The Last Days of Soft Machine. Enveloped in dense greenery, every corner of the island is alight. Glasses clink sharply against one another, held up high to commemorate the end of Beach Resort Tiberio, wherein Mueller’s new paintings delineate the detrimental culmination of the Black Flamingo Sad Boys’ exhaustive lifestyle of excess, in the event of one last great celebration.

In a culture consumed by the futile pursuit of countless, short-lived pleasures, Mueller derives elements from Russian Decadence to portray overindulgent habits of the resort’s inhabitants. Influences of 19th century Romanticism pervade Mueller’s overarching body of work; from earlier depictions of lush forests and wooden cabins, to cinematic stills of smooth-edged Sardinian rocks surrounded by sweeping planes of blue sky and sea, and derelict architectural spaces of the former prison, bleached white under the heat of the sun.

Across a vast, sweeping panorama of the cacophonous celebration, we are made witness to a party occurring in slow motion and all at once. Mueller shines a harsh light on a drastic undoing of the “soft machine” – the own human body, as alluded to within William Burroughs’ novel – and like atrophy to fragile anatomy, follows its spiralling descent towards ruination. Undulating intervals of contemplation, throbbing chaos, and all that remains in between, are fleshed out within the paintings of Philip Mueller.

Akin to the nature of a nearly incomprehensible fever dream; fast, yet excruciatingly detailed – Mueller employs and accentuates rich, picturesque imagery with a heavily injected use of saturated color, to elucidate the stark contrast between grandiose illusions of opulence and their very transience. Fleeting impressions of beauty in representations of classical sculpture and idyllic sceneries are juxtaposed with acts of violence and vandalism. “Nothing can be holy that is human built,” are words as spoken by the artist.

After a screeching halt comes silence. Tarnished helmets and car debris lie still in the wake of a new era. In the stillness of the aftermath, as the dust begins to settle from the debris of a lotus-eating culture, the inevitable question of what lies beyond appears: What is next in store for the Black Flamingo Sad Boys?

Courtesy of Carbon 12.

Tabari Artspace is delighted to announce that Haifa-based, Palestinian hyperrealist Samah Shihadi’s solo exhibition, Terra Un(firma), will premiere in line with the launch of the highly anticipated Cromwell Place exhibition concept in South Kensington, London. The body of work produced for Terra Un(firma) is divided into two segments, The Living and The Land, which take the artist’s personal narratives and feminist outlook as a starting point from which to explore issues faced by women, across cultures, in the contemporary moment. The Living is a reflection upon the artist’s complex and conflicting internal (psychological) and external (social) worlds. As a dual marginal existing within a liminal space Shihadi navigates the clashes between individuality and responsibility that comprise contemporary womanhood in her society and extend towards women, globally, who face discrimination, marginalisation, identity crisis and other multi-faceted gendered issues. The selected works for The Land turn towards the physical space and natural environment as a site of connection, displacement and contestation, which the artist conflates with notions of the home, family and collective identity. Each large-scale work selected for the exhibition has been painstakingly produced over several months. Shihadi’s work oscillates between classical-figurative realism, which dutifully captures and records that which surrounds her and fantastical surrealism that draws from the artist’spreoccupations with mysticism. Shihadi employs a dramatic approach to hyperrealism sketching using chiaroscuro to form a magical reality which blends both fiction and fantasy. Symbolism –
religious, ritualistic, political, and cultural – is interwoven into much of Shihadi’s work, forming
complex layers that the viewer must unpack in order to absorb deeper meanings.

Courtesy of Tabari Artspace

In tribute to the Lebanese people and with deep compassion, Ayyam Gallery is pleased to present To Beirut…, a charity exhibition featuring, Ammar Abd Rabbo’s latest photographs from August fourth’s tragedy. Together with the artist’s generosity, we are donating 75% of the proceeds to Beit El Baraka’s mission to rebuild and help the vulnerable.

Artist statement

Throughout my career as a photojournalist, I’ve faced difficult and emotional moments. Whether it be shots of torn families, besieged cities, or destroyed homes, it was never my neighborhood. For the first time, the atrocity and destruction took place in a very familiar environment. Of course, I felt compelled to capture what was going on.

In just a few seconds, friends were lost, families were separated, people were wounded, and not to mention the material devastation. We all bear scars from August Fourth. Fortunately, I wasn’t in Lebanon during the blast. I can only empathize with the shock everyone lived through and survived. I made sure to take the next flight into Beirut.

Here is a selection of the scenes and moments I captured; trying to mask the explosion, I avoided shots of the injured and vulnerable. The large scale shots not only show the immensity of the catastrophe but are also abstracting the situation. Creating incredible images straight out of Sci-Fi movies such as ‘Mad Max’ and ‘Planet of the Apes.’ I just wish those were also fiction rather than Beirut’s reality.
I believe photographs remain when people separate, dictators fly away, loved ones leave, images are witnesses. They are a constant reminder of the past, a reality we cannot deny, an issue we have to address.

We cannot hide moments we’ve witnessed.
Dearest Beirut, I wholeheartedly hope for all your wounds to heal, all scars to fade, all houses to be rebuilt, all businesses to revive, and that from this tragedy, only these photographs remain.

To Beirut, with Love…
Ammar Abd Rabbo

Courtesy of Ayyam Gallery

Zawyeh Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of contemporary young Palestinian artist Ruba Salameh, titled Tensegrity at the gallery new permanent location at Alserkal Avenue in Dubai. Opening on 17 October 2020, the exhibition explores tension between a set of geometrical shapes and hordes of ants taking over the aesthetically pleasing canvas. In this exhibition Salameh breaks the rules or rather breaks free from the authority of the art form. She builds concrete structures of abstract arrangements compromised of geometrical shapes using cold pastel acrylic colours and distributing the shapes carefully and minimally on the canvas. Yet, this monotonous harmony is disrupted suddenly and in a rather unexpected way. Salameh discretely introduces hordes of small chaotic ants crawling about in curiosity, assembling around the shapes as if trying to jointly carry them away. They gather in the corners as if stuck in search for their nest or are scattering around in conflicting paths.

The artworks bring to mind the notion of resilience of an indigenous population in a situation where their own living space diminishes continuously as a result of an incessant expanding domination by colonial powers. Slowly and discretely, the indigenous population motions transform into a form of disruption in a challenge to the supremacy of the dominant power. Taking all health and safety measures, Ziad Anani, Director of Zawyeh Gallery, expects audiences to be able to attend and enjoy this unique art exhibition, a first of its kind at Alserkal Avenue for a young emerging Palestinian artist especially that this is the first exhibition at the new permanent location of the gallery at Alserkal Avenue.

Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery.

For their forthcoming exhibition, Toys and Trophies: From Zeus’ Pandora to Barbie Doll Lebanese painter, Tagreed Darghouth has produced a fresh body of work that began eight months ago and came to completion during the aftermath of the explosion, in Beirut’s port – her studio, located in Mar Mykel, was completely destroyed. This exhibition, then, comes at a moment of heightened pain and need that flows from Lebanon and cries out through Dargouth’s art. As a gallery that has always worked with and propelled Middle Eastern artists, representing several form Lebanon, the recent trauma that ensued from the explosion has shaken and saddened our community their team. they aim to use their platform to support and show solidarity wherever possible, as such, 10% of proceeds from the sales of works included in this exhibition will be donated to the Lebanese Red Cross.

The selected works aim to probe the socially constructed reality of feminine beauty and its relation to the male gaze in contemporary, neoliberal society. Working with acrylic on canvas the artist continues her unabashed social commentary, reflecting upon what she encounters on the streets of Beirut and beyond in the cybersphere where international mass media and social media platforms continue to shape and reinforce limiting and dominant visions of gender.

Darghouth, who regularly connects far-flung influences from literature, philosophy and music to her personal experiences in the modern world now turns to Greek mythology as her point of departure. Pandora was the fabled first woman to be constructed in ancient Greek society and unleashed with unrivalled physical beauty and immense sexual allure. The artist, probes the fabricated nature and superficiality of Pandora, a woman over whom Aphrodite ‘spilled grace’ and whose destiny was to become “an evil men will love to embrace”. Conflating the classical with the contemporary throughout this body of work; Pandora, Darghouth reasons, is a myth but so too is the Barbie doll. Barbie’s plastic physique has become a modern icon associated with pre-packaged western gender expectations and superficiality.

The selected works see Dargouth’s paintbrush activate and amplify the constructed nature of human fictions and the fetishised status of femininity. Skulls, which have featured regularly in the artist’s output since 2010, are included here refer back to her preoccupation with the notion of ‘Memento mori’ and feel all the more poignant now given the backdrop and context of this exhibition. Dargouth also interrogates the frail and fair frame of the Barbie doll, the unquestioned and iconised beauty of Venus and Aphrodite, glossed lips, the human torso and mannequin dummies which exist to be draped. Through prominent, layered brushstrokes and swift flicks of the wrist the artist engages in her own form of seduction as she pushes the viewer to consider her subjects anew.

On Toys and Trophies: From Zeus’ Pandora to Barbie Doll, Tagreed Darghouth Says: “The thin and fair doll became a cultural icon in America and around the world. Selling over 58 million pieces per year, the plastic silhouette became both women’s ultimate ambition and men’s trophy fantasy. Aided by mass media, product slogans, gender stereotypes, female objectification, plastic surgery and social media photo filters the “Pandora’s box” of capitalism released, with the Barbie Doll, its unattainable standards of beauty and perfection. Those standards have since become central to women’s identity and men’s status. In other words it “spilled grace” over a doll’s head to become the toy all little girls want to have, the body all women desire to achieve, and the fantasy all men love to embrace.”

Courtesy of Tabari Artspace.

Fann A Porter Amman and artmejo are pleased to present Spaces, a collective exhibition featuring the works of artists Laila Taweel, Lina Khaled, Sama Shahrouri, Tawfiq Dawi, and Zeina Salameh, on view from 20 October to 20 November at Manara Arts & Culture, Amman.

The realm of spatial existence carries possibilities of multiple conceptual realities. Of these, our select young artists each focused on a singular ecosystem to examine thoroughly. Separated by geography, personal values and mediums, the full body of presented work examines various realities of Space.

The coming collection highlights various forms of art, from photography to sculpture and installation art. The young artists seem to be dwelling in thought over a brief encounter with a lifechanging event or the memories it rippled.

Personal, Actual, Open, Safe and Mental spaces are studied in the coming works. On their own, each collection by the artists showcases a single conceptual reality, but together they formulate a whole greater than the sum of its part.

Courtesy of Fann A Porter.

Mamut Art Project 2020 kicks off its online platform and on-site exhibition at its brand new venue Yapı Kredi bomontiada on Tuesday, October 27. With a focus on discovering independent creatives across Turkey and providing an exhibition platform, Mamut Art Project has provided portfolio days, professional development consultancy and supported networking between artists and art professionals for the past 8 years. This year the exhibition will showcase the works of 49 artists selected from over 1,500 applications.

Yapı Kredi bomontiada plays a leading role in collaborative and participatory commissions and has provided a dynamic platform for innovative artists from all disciplines since its inception. Hosting this year’s edition of Mamut Art Project, a comprehensive system of protective measures has been put in place for a reformatted exhibition programme,whereby visitors are invited to an artist’s loft set up.The visits will be conducted by appointment and free of charge.

For the first time this year, Mamut Art Project offers an online platform for its 8th edition comprising a diverse selection of nearly 400 works by 49 artists, bringing art audiences and artists together in a variety of formats on its website, and social media channels. Functioning as an archive for Mamut artists, the website mamutartproject.com will create access to the artist’s works, provide free consultancy services for visitors and in the future develop into an international platform connecting Mamut artists with art lovers all around the globe.

Courtesy of Mamut Art Project.

In the wake of the terrible explosion that extensively harmed the city centre and harbour area of Beirut, Lebanon, Opera Gallery wishes to give back and participate to the reconstruction of this beloved city.

Notwithstanding the severe damage sustained by the gallery space, Opera Gallery Beirut takes a stand as active contributor to rebuilding the city. Convinced that appreciating art and beauty is a matter of Love, Opera Gallery wants to give love back.

All proceedings of this show will be donated to four prominent Lebanese NGOs: Arc-en-Ciel, Caritas, Beb w Shebbek and Offre Joie.

Courtesy of Opera Gallery Beirut.

Throughout its relatively short history as a medium, photography has been credited with the power to evoke a sense of immediate intimacy and connection. This power is on full display in A Tacit Inheritance, with a collection of traditional and conceptual portraits by Elizabeth M. Claffey and Rania Matar. The photographs made by these two talented artists advance a layered celebration of connection by depicting cross-cultural and cross-generational themes of our shared humanity.

Elizabeth Claffey’s series, Matrilinear, offers a poetic window into the layers of memory embedded in a series of object portraits that represent a collective thread weaving together past, present, and future. The stark black and white of these photographs invoke x-ray images that incisively reveal the underlying personal histories and memories literally woven into the fabric of each garment. “Women play many complex roles within the structures of kinship: daughter, sister, cousin, mother, aunt, grandmother; these roles can be fluid and at times overlap,” says Claffey. She continues by observing that “Matrilinear aims to create space for the deep knowledge base that women can develop through interaction with home space and each other.”

Rania Matar’s project, Unspoken Conversations, is a series of meticulously crafted portraits that explore the formation of generations through womanhood at two seminal stages of life, adolescence and middle age, with both mother and daughter included in a single frame. The images reveal each subject’s subtle glances, gestures, and emotions that convey simultaneously the personal and universal complexities of the mother and daughter relationship. “In this work,” writes Matar, “I seek to focus on our essence, our physicality, our vulnerability, on growing up and growing old – the commonalities that make us human, to emphasise underlying similarities rather than apparent differences across cultures and to ultimately find beauty in our shared humanity.”

The relationships on display here are unique and powerful. The subjects, represented before the lens in Matar’s images and metaphorically in Claffey’s, are the givers and caretakers of life, the original “originators” who quite literally carry humanity forward. Side-by-side, the photographs in A Tacit Inheritance might evoke the phrase Nature vs. Nurture, the classic debate about our existence that is as old as humanity itself. Where Matar’s portraits could represent the Nature side, through the physical connection of mother and daughter, Claffey’s images are the Nurture side with their deliberate curation and maintenance of generational memory. Rather than in opposition to each other, we should view these two bodies of work together as representing the nurturing nature of our shared humanity through inherited memory and connection.

—Aurora PhotoCenter

Courtesy of The Herron Galleries

Hauser & Wirth New York presents rarely seen works made by American artist Jack Whitten (1939 – 2018). The exhibition focuses on his practice from 1991 through 2000, a period of intense experimentation during which, deeply affected by tumultuous world events, he strove to incorporate them into his work. Blurring the boundaries between sculpture and painting, and between the studio and the world, the multidimensional works on view combine geometric abstraction and found objects to mine spiritual and metaphysical thematic veins.

Among works on view are examples from Whitten’s Totem and Mask series of paintings, powerful elegiac works inspired by contemporary events that held deep significance for the artist. These commemorative works reveal Whitten’s ongoing fascination with African sculpture and his use of unconventional materials – acrylic, recycled glass, plywood and eggshells – in intricate, mosaic-like compositions. In ‘Mask II: For Ronald Brown’ (1996), Whitten recalls the Commerce Secretary in President Bill Clinton’s cabinet, whose untimely death in a plane crash was mourned in the Black community across America. Whitten’s homage to Brown contains layers of reference imagery forming a triangle, reflecting the symbiotic relationship between spirituality, thought, and syntax. For Whitten, honoring the contributions by important Black figures was a recurrent theme in his work, as seen with his Black Monolith series.

The Black Monolith series began in the mid 1980’s, in which Whitten honored various African American intellectuals from the 20th and 21st century. These laid the groundwork for the subsequent Totem and Mask works. In the context of the events of 2020, these works have acquired added significance and portent. ‘Totem 2000 IV: For Amadou Diallo’ (2000) pays tribute to the young, unarmed Guinean immigrant whose wrongful death at the hands of four New York City plainclothes police officers ignited outrage. In a letter written in May 2000, Whitten explained, ‘I constructed a dark totemic elegy in memory of Amadou Diallo…The preservation of memory interests me. Memory is preserved in the paint.’

The layered and reflective surfaces of many of the works on view are more akin to relief sculpture than conventional painting. Whitten used pieces of dried acrylic paint chips – what he dubbed ‘tesserae,’ referring to ancient Greek and Roman mosaic tile – to construct a unique visual language enriched by the various chemical compositions of his embedded materials. In ‘Totem 2000 VIII: For Janet Carter (A Truly Sweet Lady)’ (2000), muted monochromatic shades of grey and black are juxtaposed with a warm palette of pastels at the center of the work. In the acrylic collage ‘Totem 2000 VI Annunciation: For John Coltrane’ (2000), Whitten pays homage to the complexity of the work created by an iconic jazz master. The artist’s deep appreciation for free composition jazz, with its spontaneous call-and-response inventiveness, surfaced as a regular motif in his work. In the landmark painting ‘Memory Sites’ (1995), Whitten experiments with the surface effects of acrylic paint to address man’s inhumanity to man. Made in tribute to Israeli politician and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated on 4 November 1995, ‘Memory Sites’ uses acrylic paint chips to resemble the texture of bone. This reconfiguration is reiterated by the shapes of skulls that emanate from the bottom of the work when looking at it from a distance. Combining abstraction and representation in using acrylic to replicate natural materials, this powerful painting evinces Whitten’s exceptional technical powers as well as his deftness at conveying the effects of tragedy on the human spirit.

Art historian Richard Schiff has written: ‘Some of Whitten’s memorialising images, following a death or a disaster, are celebratory of the person or of a resistance to adversity. Others convey the tragedy of a situation, and without lifting the weight of the pain, may still induce a rewarding state of contemplation, both aesthetically and thematically. The range of emotion captured in or projected from Whitten’s art is remarkably broad— multifaceted like his tesserae surfaces.’
Together, the works on view reveal an artist of extraordinary sensitivity, capable of imbuing modernist abstraction with the vibrations of historical narratives and histories and bringing the spiritual and material realms into alignment.

‘I AM THE OBJECT,’ will coincide with a second printing of ‘Jack Whitten: Notes from the Woodshed (2018)’ from Hauser & Wirth Publishers.
Whitten’s work from the 1970s will be the subject of a major exhibition at Dia:Beacon in Fall 2022.

courtesy of Hauser & Wirth New York

Hauser & Wirth presents ‘Internal Riot’ an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by American artist George Condo. Made during the quarantine period, these works reflect the unsettling experience of physical distance and the absence of human contact during this prolonged time of social isolation. The pandemic has forced Condo to take his portraiture practice to a new level, with invented characters captured in an abstract web that reveals the humanity inherent in their fractured psychological states.

In this new body of work, Condo’s figures grapple with the overwhelming uncertainty and dissonant emotions that are being felt across the globe. The portraits reflect a range of emotions occurring simultaneously within us. The subjects depicted are devoid of connection to one another in a state where, according to the artist, ‘we are dealing with opposing forces and the elasticity of time.’

Artist Statement

Thought Block: George Condo on ‘Internal Riot’

‘These paintings and drawings explore my experience in isolation and reflect the inner isolation we have all experienced throughout our lives. Internal dialogues while in transit or asleep or in the form of dreams. The pandemic has forced us into that strange, unidentified region of the mind where it seems to function on its own without any guidance. Now our rules and daily lives have been re-ordered as well – face masks, endless sanitization, gloves, and germ warfare. Without structures and data, the humanitarian effort to bring the human essence back into the picture and empathetically solve the virus and our own inner turmoil has turned into a much bigger picture over these last so many months since I left the city. The virus turned deadly and its attack amplified the flaws in humanity, the ruthless denigration of people simply for what they look like and where they come from.

The protests were justified. I protested with my paintings. In a psychological sense, I lit them on fire and turned them upside down in revolt and sickness, ‘Internal Riot,’ which I’m naming this exhibition is about that feeling of just wanting to turn your world upside down and burn it to the ground… and hope a new planet will be born. It’s about that transcendental moment when all things are everything.

Other paintings and works on paper are my interpretations of the abstract web humanity is caught up in. Compositions moving diagonally on the canvas from right to left or left to right, the polarization, no straight up and down, an endless saga of going one way or another, ending nowhere. Clashing profiles, both reasonable and unreasonable, anger, mistrust, and fear. ‘Father and Daughter With Face Mask’ captures the staring eye of the insane father as the younger child is rendered over a silver mask. His protective maniacal head is trapped in a diagonal construction site over which he has no control. ‘There’s No Business Like No Business’ is what appears to be an out of work, unemployed man who could have once stood out in front of a Broadway theatre handing out pamphlets. Covid-19 has shut all those theaters down. Now, he too, is trapped in diagonal suspension, waiting endlessly for the lights to turn green and his job to return. Perhaps it never will.

All the paintings relate to the spontaneous, improvisational nature of the works on paper, their immediacy. The painting Internal Riot and the drawing Portrait of Virginia Woolf, are totally interrelated. I worked on a daily basis, dating each piece when it was finished. Some took days, others weeks. Some took only hours. And then the days of doing nothing seemed longer, the elasticity of time became apparent to everyone I know. People call on the phone and can’t remember what day it is anymore, can’t remember what they ‘used to do’ or know what in fact they ever will do. There is a migratory sense in the air. People want to move… with no clear path in sight. This is the moment for change. As an artist I know I can right wrongs in my paintings and that is what I do. I unite every form and color and harmonize it to the point where it sings like a choir. I’d love to see the world do that.’

Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present Imitating Equilibrium, an online solo show by Tunis-based artist Dora Dalila Cheffi, opening on November 10, 2020.

Dora’s series of self-portraits comments on the layered relationship we have with ourselves and our values in the cacophony of hyper-connectedness. We’re living through a time where we are experiencing the degradation of a shared reality, seeing the world through the lens of social media and the Internet, while also reflecting on the pseudo-realistic versions of ourselves that we project onto our social circles and the Internet-at-large.

‘Imitating Equilibrium’ is a series of twelve self-portraits discussing the results of these anxieties, longings, and reflections. This series dips into a well of femininity, visiting feelings of loneliness and fragility in what is already a foggy time, and speaks to how human it is to find momentary relief in synthetic iterations of our person at moments when it is hard to face ourselves.

Filtered versions of reality shape the thinly veiled surrealist leanings in certain self-portraits, while others depict a more deliberate presentation of augmented reality, citing the high maniera attitude of art-imitating-art by making references to iconic imagery in popular culture through the use of Instagram filters that went viral throughout 2020. Our personal feelings are reflected in our collective feelings, which are mirrored back to us ad nauseam, forming a matrix through which the Internet imposes itself on reality.

Courtesy of Taymour Grahne Projects

This season Christie’s presents a charity sale, We Are All Beirut dedicated to relieving the arts community following the devastating explosion this August. Offering a unique selection across art, design and jewelry sourced from our international and Middle Eastern teams, the auction and related programming seeks to unite the regional arts community through this noble cause.

Sale proceeds will benefit Arab Fund Arts & Culture (AFAC) a trusted NGO, to directly assist the arts community in Beirut with additional proceeds given to the Red Cross from a section of the sale which was sourced by a trusted partnership with a Beirut based arts entity.

AFAC will be pooling the resources towards redistributing financial support across all artistic fields, specifically targeting the arts scene in Beirut. Institutions such as the Sursock Museum and local galleries that suffered extensive damage will receive these proceeds, both in terms of repairing structural damages and via rehabilitation programmes that AFAC launched after the explosion.

As part of this charitable initiative, Christie’s is collaborating with strong Beirut based design and production companies. A dedicated e-catalogue will be designed by MFB Studio along with a dedicated video produced by Boo Productions to highlight key cultural figures’ generous support of this initiative.

Courtesy of Christie’s.

For more than six decades, American artist Ida Applebroog has continuously engaged with the polemics of human behavior, often exploring interrelated themes of power, gender, politics, and sexuality. Her exhibition ‘Applebroog Birds,’ opening 12 November at Hauser & Wirth New York, finds the 91 year old artist advancing her trenchant political inquiry through avian portraits, paintings, and sculptures, all of which are ripe with symbolism relevant to this unprecedented moment. This exhibition expands upon the ‘Angry Birds of America’ works she began making in 2016 and reaffirms her status as one of contemporary art’s most consistently inventive political image-makers.

A pioneering artist of the feminist movement since the 1970s, Applebroog constantly evolves her visual vocabulary and draws from a diverse array of themes, memories, and mass media sources. In 2016, Applebroog became captivated by ornithology and John James Audubon’s skill at merging art and nature. She developed an interest in drawing birds nestled in trees. Quickly realising that Audubon and other ornithologists work from taxidermal birds, Applebroog began collecting birds and reading ornithological books, eventually producing her own models in plaster and paint.

Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Pi Artworks Istanbul is pleased to announce the London-based and award winning artist Selma Parlour’s first solo exhibition in Istanbul.
Selma Parlour is known for her meticulously rendered oil paintings that appear as though they’re drawn or printed. Her invented coda to historic abstract painting and minimalism reassesses in/extrinsic conventions from a contemporary perspective. This is the London-based award-winning artist’s first solo exhibition at Pi Artworks Istanbul and includes examples of her characteristic units of luminous colour, delicately shaded bands, diagrammatic space, and her haptic surfaces.

Centre stage are three paintings from Parlour’s new series Mirror. Here two stacked fictive alcove spaces have had some of their sides erased, bringing the illusion of depth into question. The artist’s refined application and restricted palette recalls pencil shading and polished metal. Parlour states:

“The emphasis is on doubling. And I think of them as machines, but the polished metal effect isn’t the thing, rather it’s how to convey reflected light, I’m bouncing light around. My suspended shapes and missing boundaries alter what we perceive. The back edge of a box space becomes a horizon line and then quicksand. A rectangle with perspective is a trapezium. I’m fixated on our switch of cognition: That we see flatness or illusion but not at the same time.”

Parlour’s Smack Dab series of small paintings are also poised with the potential to morph. An English language expression meaning exactly or directly ‘smack dab in the middle’ implies that something is in the way. Suggestive of shaped canvases or fragments of stained glass, these compact paintings catalogue Parlour’s distinct pictorial vocabulary.

In some works, Parlour has used a laser-engraving machine put into service to remove miniscule incremental degrees of white primed surface, thus creating subtle tonal variations of primer, and finally revealing the actual raw linen surface within/beneath. In the playful Miniaturised Minimalism series, identical mock salon hangs of laser-made ‘paintings’ (floating rectangles) provide a fixed starting point across each canvas ready for varied oil-made compositions of fictitious gallery displays.

Courtesy of Pi Artworks

Christie’s is delighted to present masterpieces of unsurpassed quality by John Frederick Lewis, Gustav Bauernfeind and Jean-Léon Gérôme in the upcoming dedicated sale of Orientalist Art.

Lewis’ 1872 depiction of Cairo’s Bezestein Bazaar of El Khan Khalil is an exciting composition, filled with life and energy, and a true reflection of the bazaar through the eyes of arguably the greatest British Orientalist artist. The impressive scale of the painting has not compromised the artist’s intense dedication to detail, bringing an unrivalled verisimilitude to the painting. On 9 April 1889 Gustave Bauernfeind’s diary describes how he had a chance encounter with the warden of the mosque on his exploration of the city of Damascus, which would form the basis of this very detailed and rare glimpse into the sacred Sinan Pasha Mosque. The painting is characterised by the artist’s very accomplished use of colour and light, which transports the spectator and shares a view into a place and culture unknown to many in its time. Jean-Léon Gérôme’s intensely powerful Un Chef Bachi-Bouzouk, painted when the artist was at the height of his powers, depicts a chieftain of a group the artist prized as a subject for their unabashed masculinity and the individuality and colourfulness of their costumes.

Christie’s Orientalist Art auction encompasses a wide variety of works which form an artistic dialogue between cultures. A variety of mediums – from paintings and works-on-paper to sculpture– show a tremendous variety of creative output inspired by the travels of Western artists to the Middle East. Highlights also include works by famed artists such as Carl Haag, Frederick Arthur Bridgman and Rudolf Ernst. They each draw on their experiences to offer unique insights into daily life in the Middle East in the 19th Century.

A preview of the sale will be on view from Sunday, 25th October to Wednesday, 28th October.

Courtesy of Christie’s.

Organised by Bobbito Garcia

Beginning Thursday, November 19th, Fort Gansevoort will present Memories of Puerto Rico, an online exhibition featuring a selection of paintings by Nick Quijano, organised in collaboration with critically acclaimed Puerto Rican author, filmmaker, and DJ, Bobbito Garcia.

Memories of Puerto Rico is Fort Gansevoort’s first exhibition with Nick Quijano, who was born in New York and is now based in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Quijano moved to “La Isla del Encanto,” the enchanted island, in 1967 at the age of thirteen. The foundation of his artistic practice was formed at the University of Puerto Rico, where he focused on architecture and environmental design, and studied under the late painter José Antonio Torres Martinó (1916 – 2011). Crafting a creative philosophy based upon his response to the local context and identity as a citizen of the Caribbean, Quijano experimented with various mediums, from collage and printmaking, to furniture design and assemblage, before devoting himself exclusively to painting.

The energetic culture or Puerto Rico takes center stage in Quijano’s art. In providing perspective on his oeuvre, curator Bobbito Garcia observes, “the good-hearted people of our island really have this sense of respect and care for their neighbors. When I saw Nick’s work, this sensibility was immediately apparent. He is painting for the common people.” Quijano represents his subjects through a patriotic gaze, rendering the specifics with deep affection. Baila la calle (de noche, baila la calle de dia) (Dance night and day) (2014) and El Encuentro (Rendezvous) (2020) incorporate two of the artist’s central themes: music and dance. The former painting portrays a couple dancing hand in hand on a city street, with the pavement beneath their feet mirroring their lively rhythm. El Encuentro captures the allure of an environment animated by music, focusing on a couple’s tentative foray into a crowded disco. Merengue and bolero – two styles of music and dance that enjoy paramount popularity in Puerto Rico – are depicted as catalysts for unity among members of the community – vehicles through which the collective and intimate are experienced.

Influenced by both recollections from childhood and the aesthetics of Caribbean folk art, Quijano also aims to illustrate the sacred nature of quotidian life on the island. La siesta de Tía (Aunt’s siesta) (2020), captures his proclivity for conventional scenes. In this painting, a woman reclines on her sofa, enveloped in a tender atmosphere. The meticulous patterns of her surrounding interior lure the viewer to examine all the painting’s detail closely. Another signature of Quijano’s work, his use of rich color to express emotion and visual wonder, often extends beyond the surface of the painting to implement the picture frame as part of his composition. Two examples of this technique are Mancogero (Mango man) (2020) and Mercado (Market) (2020), in which the boundaries of the frame are breached in order to animate the composition, carry its energy outside of the formal experience of the work itself, and indicate that the imagery we see is an amalgam of what is observed and what is remembered – or, rather, beyond the limits of the physical.

Through the transformation of memory, Quijano creates a portal into the everyday happenings that unite the past with the present in a celebration of timeless experiences. He has said, “I hope that people can relate to these pieces, because they are autobiographical, if not physically or metaphorically, then symbolically,” In this sense, Memories of Puerto Rico is an homage to the distinctive heritage of Puerto Rico, and a means through which the artist introduces elements of this heritage into the conversation of contemporary art.

Courtesy of Fort Gansevoort

Ayyam Gallery is pleased to present Liaisons, a solo exhibition featuring Kais Salman’s works. The selection spotlights an important body of work from 2012 to his most recent canvases.

About the exhibition

Continuously challenging notions of beauty, Kais is known for his bold and expressionist exploration of the human subject, society, and the collective. The artist critiques humanity’s vanity, materialism, dependencies, and social norms through various compositions.

Kais’ disfigured, nearly nude anti-heroes and heroines are placed vulnerable facing the viewers’ gaze; the characters are left objectified and questioned. The selection of works chosen for this exhibition highlights relationships or the lack thereof between the characters. Kais illustrates a type of disconnect between the characters, implicitly recreating society’s cliques, rivalries, and complex liaisons.

In some paintings, the characters’ poses, stances, and costumes create a hierarchy. While some of the avatars are grouped and paired, others are left alone and alienated from any connection. The figures each take independent roles, playing a part in the collective consciousness. The artist’s new work, on the other hand, differs in composition, creating a different narrative, one of unison and blurred lines, the figures overlap with space.

These associations link in the ideas of greed, and most importantly, ideological extremism embedded in contemporary communities. Kais’s usual expressionism is paired with realism, and beacons of symbolism spread across the paintings.

Courtesy of Ayyam Gallery

Blue explores the dialectic between meaning and visual sensation. Saturated with meanings – freedom, intuition, imagination, expansiveness, inspiration, sadness, faith, spirituality, wisdom, peace, serenity, ethereality, infinity to name just a few – blue has more complex and contradictory connotations than any other colour. Always among the most costly, scarce and difficult to extract, it has kept its cachet across the centuries and individual artists continue to respond to it.

Dominated by the colour in its various hues, the exhibition brings together works by a multi-generational group of artists – Driss Ouadahi (b. 1959), Shahpour Pouyan (b. 1979), Shaikha Al Mazrou (b. 1988) and Su Yu-Xin (b. 1991).

Geometric abstraction and transparency suffuse Driss Ouadahi’s practice. For Blue he presents two paintings – Errance / Wandering (2018) and Au Fur et à Mesure (2018). Known for his depictions of brutalist structures and the built environment of urban alienation, Ouadahi’s more recent works are devoid of social commentary,focusing instead on colour, light and transparency, engendering a transcendental feeling through visual sensation.

Similarly, in Unfolded (2020) Su Yu-Xin explores the relationship between visual language and sensory perception, constructing a delicate alternation of horizons, within which varying distances elicit different modes of observation. Yu-Xin’s layered surface and multiple perspectives generate a dynamic composition, an in-between place, which allows her to switch between figuration and abstraction, incorporating aspects of still-life,graphs, digital calendars, and fragments of text and memory.

A group of Miniatures by Shahpour Pouyan, made after a unique and highly unusual manuscript in the Bibliotheque Nationalin Paris, continue a series began in 2008, other examples of which are in The Met, The British Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. These reproduce the illustrated pages of an illuminated Mi’rajnama (Ascent of the Prophet) manuscript made in Timurid Herat and written in the Chaghatay Turkish language in an Uighur script – as culturally diverse as was possible in the 15th century. Pouyan digitally and manually manipulates the images to remove the figures and their attributes.Without their protagonists, what is left are arresting monochrome skyscapes of saturated blue, resembling colour field paintings in miniature.

Finally, in Sky And Ocean And Everything In Between (2020) Shaikha Al Mazrou investigates the perception of colour and the irony between literal meaning and spontaneous perceptions in art. Two blue resin blocks displayed on the floor, minimal in their aesthetics, poetic in their meaning, attempt to give form, both a thought and a sensation. Similarly, Despite The Weather (2020) questions the meaning behind what one sees. By using cyanotypes Al Mazrou manipulates light to superimpose numbers, emphasising the paradox between intangible concepts such as time and the rigid numerical constructs that represent them.

Courtesy of Lawrie Shabibi

Death has never been more alive. Rising tolls seep into our daily newsfeeds; images of the deceased pile up in worldwide media; and mortality rates are on (nearly) every global leader’s lips.

For her second solo show at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Hoda Tawakol fathoms death less as an end than as a promise of renewal. In works ranging from large-scale textile pieces to more intimate sculptures, Tawakol freeze-frames an instance of transition, a moment teetering between presence and absence, physical and ethereal.

Liminality is her realm. Here, the body reigns, and the cocoon is the ideal metaphor for this in-between state. The works capture a brief suspension within a transformative cycle, notably the passage beyond death, witnessed by the ancient cocoon-like figures of mummies, sarcophagi, and pyramids.

Tawakol revives charged rituals. She revels in both the materiality they require, and the temporality they inhabit. Her very gestures are liminal, suspended between the ancient and the contemporary.

Wrapping, moulding, binding, freezing—such are the steps that ‘embalm’ her Mummies (2020), a series of nine plump totems. The artist crams nylons with rice, squeesing, twisting, and sculpting the swelling bulges, before enmeshing them in netting. The fleshy assemblages are then ‘frozen’ in resin, channelling ancient funerary techniques that used the viscous material to mummify for eternity, a gesture that undergirds the entire show’s sense of ‘fixing’ a moment between states. Undulating blobs, mangled male genitalia, bulbous charnel abstractions—the works defy easy reading precisely because they conflate an uncanny myriad of corporal contortions and gender allusions.

Tawakol is a sculptor of textile; throughout her practice, fabrics are endowed with a force hoisting them above mere material swathes. They become entities, bristling with breasts or puckered by protuberances. In Tawakol’s hands, fabric is like skin, a sensual membrane between intimacy and exposure. Sarcophagus No. 1 (2019), for example, vibrates with vitality: the left side of the coffin-like enclosure is made of tufted ‘bandage’ fabric, peaking in rounded mounds like some perky mammary landscape, while the right ‘lid’ refracts a rainbow light in uneven silk shafts. The body is physically there—by its scale, its wadded materiality—and yet absent, abstracted. Similarly, the eyes dripping from Sarcophagus No. 2 (2020) emblematise sight. As a presumed soul peers out through the fringes of tentacular eyes on the right (eerily echoing hair that would continue in post-death growth), a cacophony of bandage-wrapping techniques—strapping, binding, criss-crossing—animate the twin lid.

Revivifying, bright-hued dye bleeds through these fabric works like an insidious witness. A diversity of unpredictable hand-dyeing techniques—batik, spotting, painting, tie-dye—creates background vortexes, like portals propelling suspended souls to another state. Or, in the case of Sarcophagus No. 2, the tie-dye ripples stare out at us like an iris—a single über-eye intensifying the chorus of dangling ceramic-eye gazes. Irregularly dyed silk is the backdrop to Sarcophagus No. 3 (2020), riddled with busty amulets and neatly punctuated by a transversal collar, a yellow, spine-like token, and a crotch-level patch pricked with wild, fin-like wads: the viewer finds a legibly mirrored morphology in the here-but-not-quite body evoked by the two-and-a-half-meter-tall work.

The pyramid, unsurprisingly, rises as a site of transition in Tawakol’s cocoon-like, death-as-new-beginning universe. One of a series of fabric works, Pyramid No. 2 (2020), composed of hand-sewn constellations of paint-dyed silk, is a flattened, aerial sweep of a pyramid cluster—a drone’s-eye view hovering over a shift in perspective. Watercolour, often a medium of experimentation for Pyramid and Sarcophagus studies, oozes through a series of works on paper (2019-2020): the familiar shapes of Mummies and Sarcophagi throb with colour, as Tawakol’s hallmark iconography—pendulous, fruit-laden date palms—endows the images with an amplified fertility. A second series of works on paper, Immaculate (2018-2020), relishes the unpredictability of dyeing: whether on paper pleated from a central point, or block-folded according to the Japanese shiboiri technique, the ink does what it wants, with the blind determination of a bodily fluid. Immaculate No. 12 (2018), for example, is a scream of colour, yet it functions as a witness to some vivid, fluid act, bearing the traces of a bodily secretion. It throbs resolutely, like an image striving to be read in a shroud.

Throughout her practice, Tawakol has wrapped uncomfortable questions (particularly relating to the manipulation of women’s bodies) in sharp-witted, spirited works. Like the liminal states she navigates in Between Bodies, her strategy is double—vivacious yet critical, vaguely salacious yet earnest. While her lens on the afterlife may offer glimmers of hope to some in our current moment of biological uncertainly, Tawakol’s works in Between Bodies perform a far more daunting task—they bring us nose-to-nose with our finitude, suggesting it may only be the beginning.

Courtesy Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde

In scarce moments of contemplative silence, we find no short-lived consolation, only sobering reality. There is no refuge from the roaring cacophony of the human experience, no mitigation of our conflicted circumstances, no momentary stillness within the chaos. From underneath the blinding glare of a bright light, New York based artist Sara Rahbar (b.1976, Iran) elucidates numerous contemporary issues within our society as we witness an immense buildup of frustration, a bubbling anger – a relentlessly growing hunger for change and revolution in these continuously evolving times of political, social, economical and environmental upheaval.

Sara Rahbar’s exhibition, titled The Space Between Us, presents an uncanny mirror of mankind’s past and present, and likely future. Through the establishment of direct parallels between the world of then and now, Rahbar encircles the larger context of sociopolitical conflicts that are deeply embedded within both the crux of her art, and in integral history. In her strict formalisation of emotions of fear, pain and violence, the works delineate an underlying, intimate study of the complex human condition.

From fleeting, forlorn glimpses of human emotion, to harsh dissections of human anatomy, to the severity of marred bronze limbs, a human element pervades Sara Rahbar’s overarching body of work. Derived from the coarse language of her sculptural works, Rahbar’s new collage series, Animals, is translated to an intuitive layering of imagery; heavily poured onto and layered with various inks and oils. The paper works portray raw, unembellished themes of military strife and warfare, and reiterated evocations of the iconographic star spangled banner are enmeshed into the saturated fabric of their narrative, touching contradictory concepts of patriotism and belonging.

Away from the unrest portrayed within the repressed assemblages, the sculptural works tread a terse material discourse between the fragility of old wood, and the unforgiving coldness of bronze. Despite the human element that is perpetually manifested within throughout Rahbar’s visual parlance, there is a discernible estrangement in their contrasting forms of media, from the sculptural works to the collages. Through this tactile juxtaposition of vastly differing elements, the works deconstruct intense emotions of discomfort and tension, and are conclusively emblematic of today.

As the discord fades to static sound in the distance, we are left alone in the vast expanse that divides and separates, in between the jagged, crudely drawn lines that part communities and nations. Irregardless of the suffocating distance that exists between us, we stand far apart – and despite being connected to one another, we act separately, without harmony. With head and heart continually misaligned, we retrace our footsteps down the same convoluted, circular path, back to the beginning once more.

Courtesy of Carbon 12 Gallery.

In her first solo exhibition at the gallery, New York-based Iranian artist Maryam Hoseini presents paintings on geometrically shaped, vertically oriented panels that draw the viewer into these abstract containers. Within these spaces, Hoseini’s equally abstracted figures – cast between the human and the animal – contest their confinement, displacement, and subjugation.

Hoseini’s dramaturgical plotting of space, both in the composition of the paintings and in their placement in the gallery, yields dreamscapes where bodies float between abstraction and figuration. The large panels simultaneously evoke the shapes of abstracted human forms and familiar architectures, while the shadows cast against the walls highlight the theatricality and fluidity in their relationship to the viewer. One becomes strangely body-conscious encountering the work – simultaneously connecting to the human scale of the panels while being alienated by the flatness of their surfaces.

A sequence of small-scale paintings elaborates on the oneiric experience of this spatial encounter. It begins with an abstracted architecture in which a checkered floor is legible but other elements are vaguely defined, and Hoseini’s signature warped bodies are set at a distance in a landscape. As the sequence progresses, the perspective of each successive painting gradually recedes to reveal more of the architecture while the figures diminish. As we study each painting, the effect is one of sharing our position as viewers with a ghostly third-person observer within the space of the paintings themselves – a voyeuristic experience of looking and being looked at as the definition of inside and outside shift.

This shifting of perspectival space within the paintings has implications on notions of historical time. As history is abstracted from its linear narratives, the landscapes and architecture depicted in the paintings hint at possible futures that evolve without the support of a coherent present, instead rising out of the cyclical ruins of the past. Some of Hoseini’s hybrid figures appear headless in their scenes; others exceed the scale of the picture plane. Each contests the workings of power that would control them: though many coyly retain gendered characteristics, the headless figures resist a narrative reading that would determine their possibilities along the lines of identity; the large-scale figures burst out of the spatial bounds of their confinement. The paintings resist the gravity that would tether them to the past and hamper their visions of alternate futures. In the shifting terrain of these quasi-visionary realms, we meet the physicality of these paintings, at once defined by their material conditions and set free by the imagination the material forms contain.

Courtesy of Green Art Gallery