The Sursock Museum is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Laure et Mazen : Correspondance(s), an exhibition of works by Laure Ghorayeb and Mazen Kerbaj.

The exhibition will open on Thursday 31 January 2019 from 18:00 to 21:00.
It will be on view until 26 August 2019.

Laure Ghorayeb is a poet, artist, and art critic. Mazen Kerbaj is an artist, illustrator, and musician. Together, they form one of the most touching artist duos. Their mediums of choice are technical pens, India ink, and paper. Sheets, sketchbooks, scraps, and rolls: paper in all its forms falls prey to the two accomplices.

Laure, the mother, is now 88 years old and at 44, her son Mazen is exactly half her age. Since 2006, and in parallel to their individual practice, they have developed a four-handed practice and unique style, where the minutiae of Laure’s strokes merge with Mazen’s big-nosed silhouettes. There is no need to recognize who does what in the flurry and entanglement of their drawings and correspondence: one need simply keep up with their frenzy and their limitless ambition.

Courtesy of  Sursock Museum

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Lawrie Shabibi

This group of recent paintings by celebrated Iraqi artist, Dia al-Azzawi reflect his abiding fascination with his country’s long and storied past. As a trained archaeologist who began his working life at the Iraqi Antiquities department in Baghdad, his references to Mesopotamian and Sumerian cultures reoccur throughout his oeuvre. Working in his habitual acrylic on canvas, Azzawi cites ancient cultures

as well as desert imagery in works such as Sumerian Sculpture, 2017 and After Sunset, 2018. In Sumerian Sculpture the figure is based on seated Sumerian sculptures found in the archaeological collections of museums in Iraq and worldwide, recognisable by its clasped arms and use of vivid colour, with the left leg raised. The vibrant hues of After Sunset were inspired by a trip to the desert, capturing the glow of ebbing daylight when the sun has dropped below the horizon of a desert landscape.

Courtesy of Meem Gallery

Hauser & Wirth Zürich is proud to present ‘Louise Bourgeois & Pablo Picasso: Anatomies of Desire’ which opens during Zurich Art Weekend on 8 June 2019. The exhibition is the first time that Picasso is exhibited in a dual dialogue with a female sculptor and brings together over 90 works including paintings, sculptures and works on paper from important public institutions and private collections such as the Fondation Beyeler (Riehen/Basel), Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas), and Kunstmuseum Den Haag (The Hague). Curated by highly renowned specialist Marie-Laure Bernadac, former curator at the Louvre, Musée Picasso (Paris), and Centre Pompidou, the exhibition is organised in close collaboration with the Louise Bourgeois Studio.

The aim of the exhibition is to foster a discourse on the work of Bourgeois and Picasso by exploring the differences and affinities in the artists’ formal, thematic and iconographic language. The presentation will display intentional pairings of works, ‘by placing these artists together for comparative analysis, this exhibition sheds new light on their oeuvres and rids us of the clichés of the virile painter armed with a phallic brush and the sculptress armed with a knife,’ explains curator Marie-Laure Bernadac. The original inspiration for the pairing came from an exhibition organised by the Beyeler Foundation in 2011, curated by Ulf Küster, which presented works by Bourgeois in dialogue with works by modern masters from the Beyeler collection confirming the artist’s position as one of the key bridges between modern and contemporary art.

Courtesy of  Hauser & Wirth

Dar El-Nimer for Arts and Culture presents La Mer Patrie, a joint exhibition of photographers Fouad Elkoury and Jeremy Peacock.

La Mer Patrie comprises of a series of photographs by Elkoury and Peacock, which illustrate a part of the lives of Palestinians in Beirut in the early 1980s, the departure of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation from Beirut to Tunis and their arrival in Palestine within the Gaza–Jericho Agreement.

The exhibition, which includes around fifty photographs and an installation, questions the notion of return by revisiting a significant era of the Palestinian cause. Moreover, the choice of exhibited photographs intends to examine the stereotypical image of Palestine and the role of Palestinians in creating such an image.

La Mer Patrie is curated by Manal Khader.

Courtesy of Dar El-Nimer

From the glimmer of a jewel to the sheen of armour, Bermejo’s ability to capture light, colours and textures in oil painting was unparalleled in 15th-century Spain.

Though fewer than 20 works by the artist are known and much of his life remains something of a mystery, Bermejo’s paintings set him apart as a technically skilled and visionary master.

Bringing together seven of his rare works, six of which have never been seen in the UK, this exhibition explores how Bermejo drew inspiration from Netherlandish painting, using illusionistic effects and a rich colour palette, to become one of the greatest artists of the Spanish Renaissance.

Courtesy of The National Gallery

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde

Hauser & Wirth is proud to inaugurate the gallery’s first summer season in St. Moritz with an exhibition of modern and contemporary works by important female artists from the gallery’s roster. Entitled ‘Material Actions’, the exhibition takes its title from a series by the artist Anna Maria Maiolino and refers to the gesture innate in the creative process. The presentation aims to explore the complex discourse of painting, questioning its inherently masculine tradition, and the different ways in which artists in the exhibition have engaged with the genre. All works show traces of the hand whether the artist is expressing geometric form, line or their own subjectivity. The perspectives featured traverse continents and decades including work by the key figures: Rita Ackermann, Ida Applebroog, Mary Heilmann, Jenny Holzer, Luchita Hurtado, Maria Lassnig, Lee Lozano and Anna Maria Maiolino.

Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

“My cages are homes of hopes. And I put a lot of things in the cages. It’s the opposite of what some people think: I do not consider what I put in cages imprisoned, but preserved, made safe.” Parviz Tanavoli, 1976

The West Vancouver Art Museum is delighted to present this exhibition of work by the eminent Iranian-Canadian artist, Parviz Tanavoli. A resident of West Vancouver for over three decades, Tanavoli is among Canada’s most significant contemporary artists. This exhibition will feature work that spans his six-decade career, focusing on his wearable art and small sculptures, prints and paintings of birds, cages and locks. The artist has returned repeatedly to these forms, allowing him to explore the themes of freedom, nothingness, poetry and history, while playing with his viewer’s awareness of traditional function and meaning. Just as he subverts the accepted meaning of a cage, he explores dualisms that manifest themselves as both significant and trivial, a poet contrasting the everyday with the remarkable.

Courtesy of West Vancouver Art Museum.

After her last monumental exhibition, Civilization, Ginane Makki Bacho continued to work with the materials, forms, and themes that have marked her sculptural work from its inception. Producing sculptures out of shrapnel and scrap metal intermittently over the last four decades, Bacho has recently shifted her attention away from the ideologically-loaded symbol of the cedar tree to the refugees of the Syrian Civil War, but both projects are bound by the artist’s approach. The cedar trees, the ISIS installation, and her two recent bodies of work are all symptomatic of a large problem: that of the modern nation-state.

Courtesy of  Agial Art Gallery