Sunrise at the Vortex, Nima Nabavi’s second solo exhibition at The Third Line gallery, presents a body of work developed between 2022 and 2025, tracing the artist’s evolving engagement with geometry, introspection, and the practice of making. Comprising pieces created in Roswell, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Dubai, the exhibition is shaped by Nabavi’s visits to locations considered energy centres by different communities. These quiet encounters with these places became catalysts for deeper internal reflection, with drawing emerging as a means of alignment between self and universe.
At the core of the exhibition is Roswell2223 (2023), the artist’s largest handmade work to date. Constructed over the course of a year using a nine-foot ruler, the piece is composed of countless intersecting lines forming a brilliant, crystalline surface. Its labour-intensive execution reflects Nabavi’s belief in intention as structure; each line an act of repetition, each repetition an act of belief.
In parallel, Sunrise at the Vortex introduces a shift in Nabavi’s methodology. Several works in the exhibition were produced using an architectural pen-plotter – an instrument traditionally used for printing blueprints. Here, Nabavi inputs hand-drawn digital compositions, allowing the machine to render them line by line using the same pens he employs by hand. This fusion of analogue sensibility and machine precision extends the vocabulary of his practice, enabling the creation of geometries no longer limited by the body’s endurance.
This embrace of technology is personal as well as practical. Nabavi recalls his grandfather, a self-taught geometric artist, whose ideas outpaced his physical ability to realise them. In this memory, the pen-plotter becomes not a replacement for the hand, but a continuation of it; a means to carry forward a lineage of form and thought. Together, the works in the exhibition reflect a practice in flux: meditative, generative, and open to transformation.
Location: Third Line Gallery, Dubai.
Date: 15 June – 27 July 2025