Gallery Isabelle announces “Disjunctions,” a solo exhibition by Lubna Chowdhary, from November 14, 2023, until February 16, 2024. The exhibition unveils Chowdhary’s distinctive disruptive artistic approach, challenging materials, traditions, and expectations. Her signature use of colour and modularity converges in a display that explores two contrasting movements: one zooming out to ponder structural contexts (such as language or the built environment), and the other delving into the intricacies of overlapping machine-made repetitions and handmade intuitions. The result is a display that revels in experimentation, framing a sequence of tensions, disjunctions, and upended dynamics.
Chowdhary’s artistic practice showcases craft and skill, paying attention to material, volume, and colour. She experiments with ceramics, glazing, and painting surfaces, establishing novel relationships with various fabrication methods.
In “Disjunctions,” tensions intermingle throughout the space, contextualised within the opposing viewpoints of zooming out and closing in. Chowdhary often occupies a ‘wide angle’ space, considering both the infrastructural lay of the land and the intricacy of detail within it. Works like “Metropolis” (2019) and the Islamic Biennial-commissioned “Endless Iftar” (2023) capture both the vast and the minute in a generous gesture. The built environment looms large: “Bind” (2023) employs industrial materials to explore their potential for art-making, referencing both the systems of our built environment and the industrial conformity of our time.
Within language itself—the ultimate structure enveloping us all—Chowdhary navigates, raising incisive questions on syntax, semiotics, and semantics. In the “Sign” (2023) and “Code” (2023) series, she reappropriates quotidian symbols from the urban landscape, merging logos, advertising, and branding images with spiritual iconographic symbols. The large ceramic panels, composed of individual machine-cut tiles, feature sleek surfaces glazed in vivid hues, arranged like puzzle pieces. In her “Code” paintings, pre-cut shapes and signs found in her environment are constructed into a jigsaw of interlocking patterns and rhythmic sequences.
In “Switch” (2023), Chowdhary creates collages with round sticker labels on pink graph paper, referencing histories of geometric abstraction. Each circular sticker, painted in subtle shades of red, is applied to the surface to form a swell of cell-like forms guided by the paper’s gridlines.
For Chowdhary, there exists “a short distance between thinking and making that happens intuitively – making in an unhindered way,” resulting in the artist’s unique expression.
About Lubna Chowdhary
Lubna Chowdhary navigates artistic hybridity, challenging Western anthropological museum representations and questioning the contextualisation of non-Western objects. Her diverse practice encompasses architecture, sculpture, installation, and painting, drawing from aesthetic references like handmade craft, modernism, and diverse architectures. Primarily working with clay and ceramics, she disrupts expectations by exploring tensions between the handmade and industrial, domesticity and urbanism, ornamentation and minimalism. Based in London, Chowdhary, born in Tanzania in 1964, has received accolades such as The Sir Eduardo Paolozzi Travel Award and three Arts Council England Awards. Her work graces public collections worldwide, including the Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, and M+ Museum, Hong Kong.
Location: Gallery Isabelle, Dubai
Dates: November 14, 2023 – February 16, 2024