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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Sursock Museum.

The 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

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present two concurrent exhibitions devoted to Piero Manzoni, a seminal figure of postwar Italian Art and progenitor of Conceptualism. During a brief but influential career that ended upon his untimely death in 1963, Manzoni evolved from a self-taught abstract painter into an artistic disruptor. Curated by Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo, director of the Piero Manzoni Foundation in Milan, the exhibitions ‘Piero Manzoni. Materials of His Time’ and ‘Piero Manzoni. Lines’ unfold over two floors of the gallery and focus upon Manzoni’s most significant bodies of work: his Achromes (paintings without color) and Linee (Lines) series.

‘Materials of His Time’ features more than 70 of Manzoni’s radical Achromes and surveys the artist’s revolutionary approach to unconventional materials, such as sewn cloth, cotton balls, berglass, bread rolls, synthetic and natural fur, straw, cobalt chloride, polystyrene, stones, and more. Traveling from Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, the exhibition situates Manzoni as a peer of such artists as Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, whose experiments continue to influence contemporary art-making today. ‘Materials of His Time’ also presents, for the first time in New York, the items on a wish list Manzoni outlined in a 1961 letter to his friend Henk Peeters: a room all in white fur, and another coated in fluorescent paint, totally immersing the visitor in white light.

The presentation of Manzoni’s work continues on the third floor with ‘Lines,’ an exhibition of over 35 works that constitute his most considered and serialized explorations. Developed in parallel with his Achromes, Manzoni’s Linee series began in 1959 and includes short, simple bands traversing rectangular sheets of paper, and increasingly long traces created with a roller on strips of paper. The artist produced a total of 90 Linee works of varying lengths, which he then sealed in cylindrical containers. The series culminated in 1960 with ‘Linea lunga 7.200 metri’ (Line 7200 Meters Long), made in Herning, Denmark. In addition to Manzoni’s cylindrical wooden sculpture ‘Linea di lunghezza in nita’ (Line of Infinite Length) (1960), a purely conceptual work, Hauser & Wirth is pleased to feature ‘12 Linee,’ a reconstruction of the artist’s exhibition originally staged in 1959 for the opening of the illustrious Azimut gallery in Milan. Also on view in the exhibition is the short film ‘Le lunghe linee,’ presented for the first time with a new soundtrack. Despite the extraordinary importance of the series for the artist, this is the first time a major exhibition has been staged around the Linee.

The two exhibitions, with installation designs by Stephanie Goto, are complemented by a special presentation of archival material from the collection of Guido and Gabriella Pautasso. Books, documents, and typewritten manuscripts authored by Manzoni shed light on his methodology. Curated by Guido Pautasso and Irene Stucchi, the display of archival materials that accompanied Manzoni’s practice adds another dimension to his life, tracing the artist’s biography reanimating his personal and creative journey for a contemporary audience.

On the occasion of ‘Materials of His Time’ and ‘Lines,’ Hauser & Wirth Publishers has released a box set of two new catalogs providing a comprehensive historical-critical analysis of Manzoni’s two major bodies of work.

Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of  Sara Kay Gallery

Luxembourg & Dayan is pleased to announce Irma Blank: Painting Between the Lines, the first solo presentation of the artist’s work in the United States since 1979. e exhibition will comprise selections from key bodies of work representing the long, prolific, and deeply poetic career of this German-born and Italy-based Conceptualist: the Eigenschriften (1968–1973), Transcrizioni (1973–1979), Radical Writings (1983–1995), Avant-testo (1990s–early 2000s), and Gehen (begun in 2017 and ongoing).

Since the 1960s, Blank’s oeuvre has existed in the space between language and gesture, unfolding over six decades as a solitary journey into the complex relationship of writing, art, and life. In each body of work, she investigates the ways in which a sign or a mark can represent a feeling, an idea, or the experience of time. In her first major series, the Eigenschriften, Blank filled sheets of paper with dense, scriptural signs that upon first glance resemble calligraphy, but are revealed upon closer inspection to be illegible marks. By unmooring her ‘writing’ from content and negating its functionality, Blank transformed the very notion of reliable meaning and set her practice on a metaphysical course. Adding to these ideas are works from her Transcrizioni series, which turns the dialogue outwards as she transcribes pages of books and newspapers by replacing words with incomprehensible strokes, yet maintaining the original format.

In her Radical Writings series, Blank more clearly tackled time as a physical gesture in paintings of intense pink (“the color of individuation, orientation, analysis, and expectation”) or ultramarine blue (“decisive, authoritative… It is the color of ink, of infinity, of utopia.”). These works reference the familiar sight of an open book, with every line expressing the pattern of the artist’s inhalation and exhalation as she traced a mark from her body to the outer frontier of the canvas.

Blank’s more recent works, the Avant-testo, begun in the late 1990s and completed in the early 2000s, con ate the imperatives of these two earlier series. To make these works, she moves handfuls of ballpoint pens in tandem from the edges of the canvas towards the center, in coordination with her heartbeat and breath until that center is so covered with markings that the lines become nearly indistinguishable. Here, writing becomes both an act of meditation and an act of being, arriving at an act of devotion. Lastly, the exhibition will illustrate examples from the Gehen series, which she started in 2017. Gehen, which means “go,” functions as an idea of a second life, a renewed perspective on movement and the body as her own shifts through time. Through her unique democratization of language, Blank liberates the viewer to experience fundamentals of human connection.

Courtesy of  Luxembourg & Dayan

Sfeir-Semler Gallery is happy to announce the opening of the third solo show of MOUNIRA AL SOLH in our Beirut space. Please join us to celebrate the artist at the opening on May 2nd, 2019 from 7PM to 9PM.

In this new exhibition Mounira Al Solh concentrates on women rights, women stories and their position in History in the Arab region.

In the entrance of the space, on a coffee-painted wall, a green neon and a chandelier made out of used plastic and cardboard cups, welcome the visitors. It navigates the thin line between spirituality and religious bigotry, mixing raw and reused materials.

Since 2012, Al Solh has been drawing and telling stories derived from one to one conversations with displaced people living in her direct neighborhood; as well as testimonies of refugees, exiled individuals and families. These series of drawings, around 500 so far, are a time and a socio-geographic displacement document. Many of these drawings were exhibited at documenta14 in Kassel, and at the Art Institute in Chicago as well as at Mathaf in Qatar.

Based on this research, Al Solh has been embroidering tents and textile shelters as well as quilts including patterns and figurative drawings; following the traditions of women practices in all civilizations, especially in the Arab ones.

A new series of paintings mixes fictional stories by women writers, and those about detained women and their sufferings in prison, in a firework of colors and forms.

In the cinema room of the gallery, we present a film that investigates how historical unrest is registered as personal or family traumas; and recounts the experiences of the artist’s maternal and paternal ancestors in Lebanon and Syria during the First World War, and the Nasserite and Pan-Arab revolutionary movements of the 1950s and 1960s.

We are happy to announce that Mathaf, Qatar has just published a monographic book about this project which is available at the gallery.

*Exhibition runs until August 10th, 2019

Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler 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

On the occasion of the Paris Gallery Weekend 2019, the gallery is pleased to launch a new solo exhibition of the Italian artist Antonella Zazzera, whose work is also on display until June 28 in the exhibition TISSAGE TRESSAGE quand la sculpture défile à Paris ! in the Espace Monte-Cristo Fondation at the Villa Datris in Paris.

This new exhibition displays the artist’s latest works, among which are her Quadri, in which she weaves, spectacularly, the painted gesture on a canvas, or plays with variations on shape and colors, the thickness of the wires, and their vibrations, to produce high-voltage sculptures in which light runs on material so as to make all its energy vibrate.

Courtesy of  Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger

Almine Rech is pleased to present a new exhibition of works by Jannis Kounellis. This is the Artist’s first exhibition in the United Kingdom since his passing, in February 2017. Comprising works Kounellis made between 1960 and 2014, the exhibition intends to act as an extensive overview of the Artist’s career.

Characteristic of Kounellis’ installation practice, two steel and coal works from 2013 and 2014 demonstrate the artist’s exploration around the weight of energy points and how these may impact space. Indeed, the piles of coal framed by Kounellis’ identifiable steel supports also function as a link to notions of smoke, an ever-present subject in his practice, as well as fire and industry. A link can also be seen between these two works and Kounellis’ personal relationship with the sea and with peripatetic travelling, specifically the Homeric notion of Nostos, the journey of a hero returning home by sea from Troy. Throughout the artist’s career, references abound to his birthplace, the Greek port of Piraeus, the former heart of the Greek shipping industry, and to transportation vessels, with Kounellis emerging as an Odysseus-like figure, on a constant voyage.

The exhibition is completed with a further two works from 2014. Featuring jute and red oil, these artworks are concerned with the juxtaposition of precariousness and fragility with the robust iron surface which they are each comprised of. These works, which are amongst Kounellis’ final ones, conjure ideas of creation and destruction, and see the artist continue in his pursuit for art in everyday life.

Concurrently with the exhibition of works by Jannis Kounellis at Almine Rech London, the artist is the subject of an extensive retrospective at the Fondazione Prada in Venice, running from 11 May through 24 November 2019. The exhibition is curated by Germano Celant, who first coined the term Arte Povera in 1967, when he published the movement’s manifesto, Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerilla War.

Loretta Howard Gallery is pleased to present What Matters by Nicolas Carone. Seven paintings and four works on paper offer a compelling cross section of the artist’s late period. The linear mark making that fill his paintings evokes the immediacy of a drawing. Similarly, his works on paper maintain a tonal, painterly quality and illustrate the artist’s lifelong commitment to both mediums. Filled with deep washes of grey, white and black, each canvas is punctuated with loose skeins of paint and linear brushwork that suggest the contours of the figure.

Nicolas Carone’s work is featured in a number of public collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, High Museum of Art; Atlanta, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Washington, DC, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; New York, Norton Museum of Art; Palm Beach. Sheldon Museum of Art; University of Nebraska, Smithsonian American Art Museum; Washington, DC, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; New York, Tate Modern; London, Walker Art Center; Minneapolis, Weatherspoon Museum of Art; Greensboro, and Whitney Museum of American Art; New York.

An exhibition catalog with an essay by Barbara Rose and the artist’s biographer Frank Messina is forthcoming.

Mashrabia Gallery is gladly announcing the upcoming solo exhibition by Salah El Mur, which will take place in parallel to the 13th edition of the Cairo International Fine Art Biennale (June 10 to August 10).

After years-long collaboration with Mashrabia Gallery, artist Salah El Mur, flagship of Sudanese art in the international scene, is back to showcase an unprecedented body of work, including this time not only his worldwide recognized colorful paintings, but also an outstanding installation of wooden and bronze sculptures.  His works portray a variety of heterogeneous traditions, folklore, vernaculars of people and environments and reproduce his exploration of the streets, cities, villages and peoples he came across throughout his life.

Courtesy of  Mashrabia Gallery

In this solo exhibition, Oussama Baalbaki presents a recent body of watercolors which extends the theme, pervading his entire practice, of the transformation of urban and rural landscapes in Lebanon. Influenced by the modern flaneur, Baalbaki paints what he sees as he moves around the city of Beirut and its peripheries. He wistfully frames the tension between the old and the new, and between nature and culture, wherein the latter is itself naturalized as part of the landscape. Baalbaki’s watercolors are distinctive in making explicit this tension. With his broad and swift brushstrokes, and bold but diluted colors, he arrests the effervescence and movement of history in a single moment.

Courtesy of Agial Art Gallery.

Concept: Responding to Poetry: a passage, the symbolism it holds and the way it is processed. Visual art referring to a poem, a stanza or lyrics from a song or ballad.
This painting ‘Duo’ is about the tension between red and green and the intertwining of the linear forms in a shallow space. Line is the underlining structure in my work and the application of this line or passages of marks needs to be considered in relation to time (line is defined by speed, pressure, time). ‘Duo’ could be considered a visual melody of a waltz where the red and green connect and disconnect and where line and time interconnect.

This poem by Brossa ‘Time’ refers to ‘line’. But the line is not a linear drawing structure as used in ‘Duo’. This poem is about reaffirming the line as a marker of time and reminding the reader of their existence. My work relates to this sense of being present (a moment in time) and my personal space is affirmed for the viewer.

Courtesy of West End Art Space.