Event Type : Agenda

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.

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

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

This November, Meem Gallery will present a solo, career-spanning exhibition of the work of celebrated Iraqi modernist, Shakir Hassan Al Said (1925-2004). The exhibition will be made up of a collection of fifteen works created over almost half a century, revealing the various phases of the artist’s prolific practice.

A painter, sculptor, art historian, philosopher, teacher, writer and art critic, Al Said is not only considered to be one of the fathers of modern Iraqi art but as one of the Arab world’s most influential and groundbreaking artists of the last century. Deeply involved in the creation of two of the most important art groups which steered the direction of post-colonial art in Iraq and united the concepts of heritage with modernity, many of Al Said’s theories outlined a new Arabic art aesthetic, presenting regional art as uniquely Arabic, instead of through the prism of the West.

The exhibition will include two rare, early oil paintings from the 1950’s, Villager (1950) and Untitled (1954), made before the artist moved to Paris where he studied at Académie Julien, École des Arts Décoratifs, and the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (1955-59), which exemplify Al Said’s work from the late 1940s and early 1950s. Despite displaying a certain affinity with Western art movements such as cubism and expressionism, the artist’s work from this period is primarily characterised by local traditions, with the use of the bright colours and loose geometric lines found in tribal carpets, as well as depictions of rustic scenes and characters drawn from rural life in Iraq, as can be observed in the stylised portrait of The Villager.

On his return to Baghdad, Al Said embraced the teachings and practices of Sufism and gradually abandoned figurative expression, turning his focus to compositions made up of Arabic letters – a very important element in the Sufi tradition. By 1971, he had formed the One Dimension Group, an artist collective that was primarily concerned with the exploration of Sufi traditions through abstract art. It was through the group that the artist further developed his theoretical approach, with the Arabic letter becoming an established element in modern regional art, a movement often referred to as al-hurufiyyah al-‘arabiyyah (Arabic letterism).

Al Said’s utilisation of the Arabic letter was not simply limited to its form or ideography, rather, he saw the letter as an intrinsic component of his vision of the ‘aesthetics of the trace’, put simply, the erosion of life and the patina left by the movement of time. Dominated by earth-tones and resembling neglected and war-torn buildings, many of the highly textured, evocative works in the exhibition make up part of the artist’s celebrated Walls series. Impulsive, clandestine, anonymous and often illegible, as if not intended to be read; the inscriptions in the compositions set against the rough cracks and crevices of his textured wall paintings evoke the furtive nature of an act performed under repressive conditions, hinting at the censorship that the writing sought to evade.

Courtesy of Meem Gallery

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

The collection of material is a non-stop process. It may have, over the years, become automatic, or may have always been the default process, i.e. this recording of the ‘surroundings’ of every passing moment, an ‘inhabitation of time’ that lingers on much longer than practically required.

At a chosen point, as one goes through and selects from this collection of recordings, it is important to note that time itself is logged in them in a certain way and decoding that log is a precarious process; it is non-linear and can open up into multiple veins simultaneously, like a rupture, resulting in a loss of control.

Courtesy of Grey Noise.

Timothy Taylor is pleased to announce Soulages | Hantaï | Eielson | Tàpies, on view between 24 November – 18 December in New York. Contemporaries born within a five-year range – Pierre Soulages in Aveyron in 1919, Simon Hantaï near Budapest in 1922, Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona in 1923 and Jorge Eielson in Lima in 1924 – all four artists lived in post-war Paris of the 1940s and came to prominence in the late 1950s. Despite the influence of the various artistic groups that informed their early practices, such as Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, each artist eluded attempts to categorise their work within a singular movement.

United by the crisis in easel painting that consumed the post-war European avant-garde, each artist broke new ground within the realm of painting by creating and serialising a new form of abstraction. This exhibition looks to the intersections between their practices, examining how each artist developed enduring ideas about abstraction on his terms through experimental and material means. These works exemplify the emphasis on materiality that has decisively marked much of post-war European art, specifically through the use of non-traditional materials and painting methods, the importance of mark making and the focus on texture and surface. In revising and remaking their theories of what constituted a painting, these artists sought to invent new syntax for a universal language of art.

In the work of Pierre Soulages and Antoni Tàpies, traces – the fragile, incomplete or erased marks on the canvas – refer to a human presence, collapsing the verbal and the visual. Soulages’ Outrenoir (‘beyond black’) series, initiated in 1979, features the formalised markings and striated surface that the artist devised in order to generate textural play between areas of black on the canvas. ‘If one thinks of the practice … I began by leaving traces, then in the same way, I added more paint, scraped and scored the surface,’ Soulages described.

Soulages’s sole use of paint and canvas to build up the surface of his works differs significantly from Tàpies, who frequently used a thick paste created by mixing paint with marble dust and plaster. The Catalan artist often added materials such as sand, wood, ceramic objects, newspaper and straw, as seen in the raw, eroded surface of the 1960 work Initials. The near-invisible incisions and scratched-out symbols point to an unarticulated language, which is seemingly without a code, yet universal, attesting to the simultaneous presence of the physical and the metaphysical worlds.

From 1960 onward, the French-Hungarian artist Simon Hantaï based his corpus on the idea of a folded rag soaked in paint, which could either be applied directly to the canvas or unfolded, to spill pigment in accidental patterns across the surface. Hantaï used this technique of pliage comme methode (folding as method) to reinterpret the Modernist grid in Tabula (1980). By depersonalising the act of painting, Hantaï questions the purpose of artistic subjectivity in the postmodern age and declares the death of the author.

Poet, writer and visual artist, Jorge Eielson sought forms of artistic expression that forged dialogue between different cultures and forms of communication. From his first solo exhibition in 1953, Eielson began creating woven abstract works based on a Pre-Columbian system of writing through the interplay of knots on cords and strings. In the 1960s, Eielson transformed this ancient codex into the fabric-based Quipus series – stretched tautly across flat canvases, looped into soft sculptures – which he conceived of as a new visual language, welding the ancient to the modern. For Eielson, the knot was understood as a sign, both ancestral and linguistic, of the tension between matter and the longing for space.

Courtesy of Timothy Taylor

Known for his complex but balanced compositions and for the destructuring of human bodies, Thameur Mejri, a painter from Nabeul, born in 1982 and professor at the School of Fine Arts in Tunis, through Walking Targets, his first exhibition at the Selma Feriani gallery, he explores a political and critical vision of Tunisian society, while engaging the responsibility of the artist with regard to contemporary issues. The title evokes a moving target and immediately places the works in the violence register – or rather the denunciation of violence – but also of survival.

We find in these new series certain constants of Mejri’s work, and in particular his attention to the human body, which he charges with a powerful political interpretation and which he has until now largely developed, especially in his large-format paintings. A change is nevertheless noticeable in the expression of this political body. It is no longer so much a matter of existential and metaphysical questions that occupy him. He seems here to be refining his reflection by working to deconstruct the relations of power and domination that structure contemporary societies, identifying in particular capitalism and the traditional ideologies that make them their instruments of control. (Text by Matthieu Lelièvre)

Courtesy of Selma Feriani Gallery

The exhibition draws out timely and necessary discussions on care, racial politics, representation, and art history, revealing Packer as one of the most significant artists of her generation.

“My inclination to paint, especially from life, is a completely political one. We belong here. We deserve to be seen and acknowledged in real time. We deserve to be heard and to be imaged with shameless generosity and accuracy.” – Jennifer Packer

This exhibition, the artist’s first in a European institution, includes paintings and drawings from the past decade alongside recent work.

Combining observation, improvisation and memory, Packer’s intimate portraits of friends and family members and flower still paintings insist on the emotional and physical essence of the contemporary Black lives she depicts. While the casual repose of her portraits is the result of her care for the sitters, Packer acknowledges her choice to paint figures as political, stating: ‘Representation and particularly, observation from life, are ways of bearing witness and sharing testimony’.

Jennifer Packer’s paintings recalibrate art historical approaches to these enduring genres, casting them in a political and contemporary light, while rooted in a deeply personal context. On occasion, Packer describes her flower compositions as funerary bouquets and vessels of personal grief; these paintings about loss are often made in response to tragedies of state and institutional violence against Black Americans.

Featuring 34 works dated from 2011 to 2020, the exhibition will present portraits of artists from Packer’s New York circle, monochromatic paintings, intimate interiors and flower still lifes including Say Her Name (2017), painted in response to the suspicious death of Sandra Bland, a Black American woman who is largely believed to have been murdered while in police custody in 2015. The exhibition will also include drawings which for Packer are rarely just a study but hold a weight of their own that differs from paintings.

Courtesy of Serpentine Gallery

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

This November, Meem Gallery will present a solo, career-spanning exhibition of the work of celebrated Iraqi modernist, Shakir Hassan Al Said (1925-2004). The exhibition will be made up of a collection of fifteen works created over almost half a century, revealing the various phases of the artist’s prolific practice.

A painter, sculptor, art historian, philosopher, teacher, writer and art critic, Al Said is not only considered to be one of the fathers of modern Iraqi art but as one of the Arab world’s most influential and groundbreaking artists of the last century. Deeply involved in the creation of two of the most important art groups which steered the direction of post-colonial art in Iraq and united the concepts of heritage with modernity, many of Al Said’s theories outlined a new Arabic art aesthetic, presenting regional art as uniquely Arabic, instead of through the prism of the West.

The exhibition will include two rare, early oil paintings from the 1950’s, Villager (1950) and Untitled (1954), made before the artist moved to Paris where he studied at Académie Julien, École des Arts Décoratifs, and the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (1955-59), which exemplify Al Said’s work from the late 1940s and early 1950s. Despite displaying a certain affinity with Western art movements such as cubism and expressionism, the artist’s work from this period is primarily characterised by local traditions, with the use of the bright colours and loose geometric lines found in tribal carpets, as well as depictions of rustic scenes and characters drawn from rural life in Iraq, as can be observed in the stylised portrait of The Villager.

On his return to Baghdad, Al Said embraced the teachings and practices of Sufism and gradually abandoned figurative expression, turning his focus to compositions made up of Arabic letters – a very important element in the Sufi tradition. By 1971, he had formed the One Dimension Group, an artist collective that was primarily concerned with the exploration of Sufi traditions through abstract art. It was through the group that the artist further developed his theoretical approach, with the Arabic letter becoming an established element in modern regional art, a movement often referred to as al-hurufiyyah al-‘arabiyyah (Arabic letterism).

Al Said’s utilisation of the Arabic letter was not simply limited to its form or ideography, rather, he saw the letter as an intrinsic component of his vision of the ‘aesthetics of the trace’, put simply, the erosion of life and the patina left by the movement of time. Dominated by earth-tones and resembling neglected and war-torn buildings, many of the highly textured, evocative works in the exhibition make up part of the artist’s celebrated Walls series. Impulsive, clandestine, anonymous and often illegible, as if not intended to be read; the inscriptions in the compositions set against the rough cracks and crevices of his textured wall paintings evoke the furtive nature of an act performed under repressive conditions, hinting at the censorship that the writing sought to evade.

Courtesy of Meem Gallery

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

The collection of material is a non-stop process. It may have, over the years, become automatic, or may have always been the default process, i.e. this recording of the ‘surroundings’ of every passing moment, an ‘inhabitation of time’ that lingers on much longer than practically required.

At a chosen point, as one goes through and selects from this collection of recordings, it is important to note that time itself is logged in them in a certain way and decoding that log is a precarious process; it is non-linear and can open up into multiple veins simultaneously, like a rupture, resulting in a loss of control.

Courtesy of Grey Noise.

Known for his complex but balanced compositions and for the destructuring of human bodies, Thameur Mejri, a painter from Nabeul, born in 1982 and professor at the School of Fine Arts in Tunis, through Walking Targets, his first exhibition at the Selma Feriani gallery, he explores a political and critical vision of Tunisian society, while engaging the responsibility of the artist with regard to contemporary issues. The title evokes a moving target and immediately places the works in the violence register – or rather the denunciation of violence – but also of survival.

We find in these new series certain constants of Mejri’s work, and in particular his attention to the human body, which he charges with a powerful political interpretation and which he has until now largely developed, especially in his large-format paintings. A change is nevertheless noticeable in the expression of this political body. It is no longer so much a matter of existential and metaphysical questions that occupy him. He seems here to be refining his reflection by working to deconstruct the relations of power and domination that structure contemporary societies, identifying in particular capitalism and the traditional ideologies that make them their instruments of control. (Text by Matthieu Lelièvre)

Courtesy of Selma Feriani Gallery