ALA YOUNIS – UAR

Posted on 2014-05-26

Many regional and international forces challenged the promise of a sovereign union of Arab states. Things, however, seemed to be gathering force in the region with a rocket-industry project on the verge of giving the Arab world unprecedented power and the Gulf flooding with oil, experts and exports. But a heart attack sent Nasser home dead from an Arab Summit. A rupture. A shock. Five million mourners marched a 10 km procession to his burial, while engulfing the coffin. All Arab heads of state were in attendance. King Hussein of Jordan and PLO leader Yasser Arafat cried openly while Muammar Gaddafi of Libya reportedly fainted twice. In Jerusalem, roughly 75,000 Arabs marched through the Old City chanting, “Nasser will never die.” In Syria as in Kuwait, a general mourning was announced for 40 days. Leipzig marched, so did Moscow who sent the Soviet Premier.

Going through a repertoire of images and objects that emerged from that time, the project studies the stories and mechanisms that produced Nasser’s historical figure. It is a finale to a trilogy of a body of work on Arab Nationalism that started with Nefertiti and Needles to Rockets (2008), and Six Days (2009). It is an exploration of individuals’ complicated relationship to Gamal Abdel Nasser as the hero and the anti-hero, to his promises and his failures. The trilogy delves into Egyptian modernism and the appropriation of symbols from a glorious past and the rhetoric of science, progress and industrialization.
Working with video, installation and publication-based projects, Ala Younis examines how Arab modernism and identity are shaped by ideology and politics. Her projects begin with found objects and images. Some are deeply intimate, while others already possess icon status – albeit ones that have been discarded or forgotten with the passage of time like a defunct Nefertiti sewing machine and a tin soldier. Each object or image becomes part of a web of stories in which the personal is inextricable from the collective.

Exhibition runs through to June 10th, 2014

Gypsum Gallery
5A Bahgat Ali Str
Apt. 12
Zamalek
Cairo

gypsumgallery.com

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MARTIN JACOBSON – LANDSCAPES

Posted on 2014-05-19

Martin Jacobson’s most recent watercolours and oil paintings depict landscapes in an almost unreal range of colours. The starting point is images found on the “scrap heap” of art history. Jacobson collects images at flea markets, second hand bookshops and on the internet. He looks for archetypical motifs and themes such as sunsets, moonlight, forests, water, sky and roads. Interpreting the originals is a way for Martin Jacobson to create an image that is both new and old, familiar and unknown. It is an attempt to repair the gap that time and space have created between the present time and the found image. In the works in the exhibition, Jacobson has more particularly focused on light and colour phenomena, which he feels correspond to the human condition. The sunset reminds us of time passing by and the dancing flecks of flight of the movement of all things.

Through painting I want to give myself a push over the threshold. I try to create images, which I cannot imagine and can only appear through painting. I begin with an idea. After a while I must abandon the original idea and follow the will of the image. I feel I have succeeded when the image has taken me to a previously unknown place. Without me getting lost on the way. Every image is a step of the way, a fragment of a larger image. The impetus to depict is a way for me to create a link between the depicted and myself. To give an abstract experience a concrete form.
Martin Jacobson

Opposite – Landscape 7, 2014

Exhibition runs through to June 21st, 2014

Andréhn-Schiptjenko
Hudiksvallsgatan 8
Stockholm
Sweden

www.andrehn-schiptjenko.com

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JAN-HENRI BOOYENS – SOME KIND OF NATURE

Posted on 2014-05-19

Similar to the Dadaist technique of automatism which relied on the improvised free-flow of thoughts and expressions, Booyens would carry on drawing as he slipped into sleep, only to discover the results of the process the following day. In describing his reasoning for this method, Booyens says that he came about it in order to try and break away from the premeditated conditioning of his compositions. Easily dismissed as insignificant marks and doodles, these drawings have however been brought to life as they are boldly reinterpreted as large-scale oil paintings, demonstrating Booyens’ inimitable approach to his medium. Energetic and occasionally violent, the works reveal a physical confrontation with the canvas as Booyens ventures into a wilderness of abstract exploration.

Booyens’ pictorial vocabulary is complex; throwing together aspects of abstract expressionism and three-chord punk rock, it juxtaposes pared-down, frenetic linear work with backgrounds of densely textured planes of soft monochromes, dominated by melancholic blues. These paintings reveal a search for a new language of painterly abstraction that is uncompromising in its urgency. Through the chaos of these compositions there comes a considered meditation on the productivity of his automatic method that brings a visual order to what might be otherwise seen as random. The works on Some Kind of Nature are simultaneously fearless and defiant, and vulnerable.

Jan-Henri Booyens’ work is often described in terms of a struggle between the representational and abstract, the rational and chaotic. An affinity and critical engagement with Modernism is coupled with his relationship to the South African landscape, both physical and social. He has been described as a “forerunner of a new kind of formalism” in South African art” *.

Opposite – Die teorie van weerstand in die gas kamer (2014)

Exhibition runs through to June 21st, 2014

Blank projects
113-115 Sir Lowry Road
Woodstock
Cape Town
South Africa

www.blankprojects.com

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