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

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

Courtesy of Palazzo Cini Gallery

‘I look at America’s heart – people, landscapes, and cityscapes – and I see it as an opportunity to add to an American art narrative…I paint because I am looking for versions of myself in art history and in the world.’
—Amy Sherald

Amy Sherald documents contemporary black experience through arresting, otherworldly paintings. Drawing upon the American Realist tradition, she subverts the medium of portraiture to tease out unexpected narratives and situate black heritage centrally in the story of American art. With ‘the heart of the matter…,’ her inaugural exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, Sherald debuts a suite of new paintings that reinforces the multiplicities of African-American life and invites viewers to reconsider commonly accepted notions of race and representation.

Courtesy of  Hauser & Wirth

Nabil Nahas’s latest solo exhibition will revolve around his fractal paintings. The fractal is a mathematical object, in which every component part identically corresponds to the whole.The fractal, part and whole, in Nahas’s work is analogous to the geometry of nature in its laws, processes, and overall logic. Each work is composed through the execution of the boundless interweaving and enfolding of different moments that constitute differential and variegated compositions, while always yielding a singular artwork. In gesturing from the finite to the infinite, Nahas alludes to a Sufi transcendentalist aesthetic, wherein the sublime in both its natural and architectural forms is evoked (think the Islamic architectural feature of the muqarnas), and the elasticity of scale between the part (micro) and the whole (macro) is preserved.

Courtesy of Saleh Barakat Gallery

An Exploration of Our Digital Presence
This exhibition invites us to look at the various facets of our immaterial digital universe,
unravelling its impact on humanity through multidisciplinary art forms.

Opening Saturday, September 14, 2019 at 6 pm
MACAM launches its 2nd BIENNALE of Contemporary Art with the topic ‘Universal Data’.
Behind the massive rustic gate of the industrial museum, over 60 Lebanese and international artists will be showcasing multidisciplinary artworks that explore our use and interaction with this ever-increasing digitalized universe.

Artists from over twenty nationalities reflect on contemporary topics, such as access to information, digital identity, freedom of expression and online communities. The featured artworks challenge our perspective on , making it more tangible through art installations, paintings, sculptures, videos, digital and live performance art.

In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, artists have been asked to reflect on how these articles apply (if at all) in this new digital era and on how access to data has influenced our perception of the world.

These questions have birthed thought-provoking and inquisitive works of art about hacking, security leaks, the fragility of manipulation of data and equal access to data, amongst others. A vast subject worth exploring more in-depth.

Mashrabia Gallery of Contemporary Art announces the fourth edition of “My Favorite Things” as the season’s opening exhibition. Meant as a platform to promote and encourage promising young women artists, this year it expands its reach, featuring a new and larger group of Egyptian artists, as well as two special foreign guests Gabriela Kobus and Courtney Crawford experimenting with contemporary artistic practices and media.

“My Favorite Things 4” by Amany Nabil, Aya Badawy, Aya Gamil, Alaa Ayman Hassan, Courtney Crawford, Gabriela Kobus, Heba Abu El Ella, Mona Essam, Marwa Saad, Marwa Talaat, Nourhan Mayouf, Nesreen Mamdouh.

Courtesy of Mashrabia Gallery

Ayyam Gallery is pleased to present Staging the Imagined, a solo exhibition featuring Sama Alshaibi’s latest body of work.

Sama Alshaibi’s newest body of work from her solo exhibition Staging the Imagined, reflects the relationships of power and authority between photographer and subject. The work investigates how a particular historical period can alter viewers’ interpretations of photographs. Through various projects, Alshaibi reframes historical photographs and moving images that according to Grace Aneiza Ali “reference a grave historic malpractice—the role of photography, both colonial and contemporary, in reducing the body, the life, the desires, the experiences, the hopes and dreams, indeed the very existence, of the Middle Eastern woman to a dangerous single story—one rooted in the primitive and in fear, fantasy, inferiority, and objectification.”

Courtesy of Ayyam Gallery

Barely a beat, the swallowed prefix that patterns these three words is a current of mercurial negation. It hovers present and absent: ‘real’ is not equivalent to fact, and ‘unreal’ is not fiction. Unlike the comfortable equilibrium of true/false, absent the prefix, these words do not render tidy counterparts. Embedded within unreal is the absolute possibility of the real; it is the breathless speculation of off-plan real estate or the towering phantoms of childhood bedtime stories.

Developed over the last decade, Alaa Edris’ multimedia experiments in film, performance, photography and digital installation distort figure and environment. Manipulations of urban and folkloric scenes accumulate into ritualistic performances of past and future, enacting provisional mappings of the systems that shape her social context.

Courtesy of 1×1 Gallery

This exhibition is organized with the exceptional support of the Musée national Picasso-Paris in the framework of “Picasso-Méditerranée,” and with the collaboration of the Lebanese Ministry of Culture.

With the generous contribution of Danièle Edgar de Picciotto and the support of Cyril Karaoglan.

Picasso et la famille explores Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) relationship to the notion of the family nucleus, encompassing everything from motherhood to children’s games, from the representation of conceptual intimacy to the numerous experiences of a fatherhood spent under the spotlight. Bringing together drawings, etchings, paintings, and sculptures, the exhibition spans seventy-seven years of creation, from 1895 to 1972, through a selection of works marking notable moments in the artist’s long emotional and family life, whose variety of forms illustrates the constant reinvention of his artistic vocabulary. For Picasso, the word “family” evokes, first and foremost, its Spanish meaning of a restricted, intimate and discreet circle, and a fertile source of inspiration for developing themes such as the love of femininity, the image of the couple, the mysteries of childhood, the simple pleasure of sharing, and the solemnity of private moments. Yet the family is also a means to explore even more universal themes such as the cruelty of war and the passing of time, and to reflect on the history of art and its motifs. Through this lens, theoeuvre of the Spanish master appears in a particular light, independent of periods and styles, rather evoking an immediacy of creation.

Picasso et la famille is curated by Camille Frasca and Yasmine Chemali.

Courtesy of Sursock Museum.

Grids. Identity. Systems. Stories. These are the centers of gravity in the debut solo show of Sarah Almehairi. Born in Abu Dhabi, her work is not just about what it means to be carving out an identity in a hyper-global world – it isher identity, readable along the walls like the lines of a poem. Photographs, maps, and obscured memories from a summer visit to a town in the north-east of Tennessee tied up in her family’s history form the basis of her investigations.

There is an ostensible division in the body of work: the narrative-figurative pieces on one side, the abstract-geometric on the other. But there is, for Almehairi, no chasm or barrier between these two ways of perceiving and representing. “It is interesting to have multiple subjects and modes at play with each other,” she says. “It’s a balancing act, like identity. It is when narrative and abstract are intertwined that playfulness, attentiveness and exploration rise.”

Courtesy of  Carbon 12 Gallery

Omar Al Shahabi’s paintings reflect the complex human configurations, always on the move… in solitude or in an overcrowded space.
The colors are sometimes dark and other times light and bright.
We are in a constant state of transition. Childhood memories, disappointments, triumphs and emotions among others, create a fusion.
Any passage we go through leaves a definite trace on us as individuals and hence on our relationship with others.
Omar’s figures are playful reminding us of Aladdin’s magic lamp and other fairy tales, yet through the multiple gazing faces we travel back through the tunnel of transition.

Courtesy of Anima Gallery

Lyons Wier Gallery is pleased to present “Myths and Mirrors” by James Gortner.

Gortner continues to refine and expand on subjects and forms he has explored throughout his career, all the while pushing his work into new terrain. The artist views the exhibition as a significant opportunity to lay bare and test what his paintings can do within these new environments. The unique qualities of Gortner’s work will be highlighted within the gallery, where his investigations of scale, color, and composition will be fully on display.

Gortner’s signature methodology consists of hand-sculpting each surface using wood, foam, staples, canvas and acrylic paint before using oil paint to realistically render the figure. The results transform the expectations of the two-dimensional surface into a beguiling three-dimensional composition. Gortner also incorporates fragments of discarded and forgotten artworks that he finds in thrift stores, other artists’ studios, as well as in his own work space, into his portraits. By harnessing the ‘energy’ of pre-dated found art, Gortner carefully combines these discordant resources into harmonious wholes, creating a style that forges new ground. It is in this ‘collaboration’ that Gortner draws upon his unique spirit, asking the viewer to suspend traditional expectations of art making and instead consider how his connectivity to the past and present expresses a new authenticity of content and ownership. Lastly, Gortner laboriously hand-constructs his own frames, suggesting a threshold for the paintings’ subjects to come forward, into ‘real life’, as they visually oscillate between the foreground and background of the illusionistic painting.

Courtesy of Lyons Wier Gallery

‘The Space of Nothing and Everything’ will feature Laurie’s signature ‘conte, coloured pencil on mylar’, and drawings on prepared gesso panels.
This much-anticipated exhibition is the first time Laurie has had a solo exhibition in the U.K. and will feature an array of brand new works created specifically for this show at Cube Gallery. These intricate, textured and detailed drawings must be seen up close to be fully appreciated, and this exhibition promises to be an exciting introduction of Laurie’s drawings to a U.K. audience, as her work already has a big international following.

Courtesy of Cube Gallery.