A SEASON IN HELL

Posted on 2015-11-16

Our imagination is not powered out of a void. It is driven by inputs and sources that surround us: vivid memories and experiences, fears and desires, films we’ve seen, books we’ve read, and stories we’ve been told. A Season in Hell brings together eight artists that have made a creative leap to reconfigure the logic of reality in their work. They twist, distort and amplify sources and subjects alike. They play with the conventions of dreams and hallucinations, as a fluid and elusive state that in its absurdity is sometimes closer to the truth.

The exhibition assembles a collection of old and recent work made out of canvas, celluloid, wood, paper, linen and plastic. Some artists have taken their queues from the explosion of mass media and online images to explore the gulf between what we see and what we comprehend. Basim Magdy’s work resembles a dramatic still from a fantasy animation, heavy with allusions to a shadowy industrial civilization. Ahmad Sabry explores the tension between image and text and the loss of meaning in a series of needlepoint on linen works. With a hyper-saturated palette, Hany Rashed presents psychological scenes from the streets of Cairo, while Marwa El Shazly mines her archive of personal nightmares. Conversely, Ranya Fouad’s dreamy works play on tranquility, stillness and subtle change.

Another group of work branches out of a figurative tradition. Doa Aly explores the fine line between resistance and flow through a series of pencil on paper drawings that make use of bone illustrations from Gray’s Anatomy. Amr Kafrawy’s triptych contrasts spectral figures against a shaky cityscape and Nada Baraka’s paintings are tumultuous and explosive, sinuously moving from organic to industrial, from deliberate to spontaneous.

The show pays homage to the spirit of Arthur Rimbaud and borrows its title from his influential poem A Season in Hell published in 1873.

Opposite – Nada Baraka, Untitled, 2015

Exhibition runs through to January 20th, 2016

Gypsum Gallery
5 Ibrahim Naguib Street, Apt 2
Garden City
Cairo
Egypt

gypsumgallery.com

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GENIEVE FIGGIS – ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

Posted on 2015-11-16

Genieve Figgis’ first exhibition at Almine Rech Gallery stands as an eloquent testimony to the monarch’s prophesy; in All the Light We Cannot See, she rewrites the fashionable mid-eighteenth-century painting genre of “conversation pieces,” in a language of clotted blood and mystical delirium which reconstrues the proposed narrative as one of dissolution suffused in luxury. In her “cover version” of Thomas Gainsborough’s famous canvas, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (c.1750, National Gallery of Art, London), as well as more immediately topical works, viz., Royal Friends, Royal Gathering, Royal Group and House (all works acrylic on canvas, 2015), she transforms the genre’s representations of landed gentry, depicted in relatively informal poses, typically outdoors and upon estates where the atmosphere of ownership and permanence are illuminated by Praz’s “sun which seemed fated never to set.” Gainsborough’s original painting, a double portrait of Robert Andrews and his wife, Frances Mary Carter (“not quite the girl next door, but probably the nearest marriageable girl of his own class”) departs from the seeming informality of the conversation piece, and therein lies its uncanny effect, elevating it to a level of Masterpiece-Capital-M above such esteemed practitioners of the genre as Arthur Devis, Johann Zoffany, Philip Mercier, Francis Hayman, and the early William Hogarth. If the original portrait was designed to commemorate the subjects’ expanded properties through their recent marriage, Figgis relocates the couple to a landscape of endless dissolution, the beauty of her liquid pigments connects the luminous blues of a melting sky to vibrant ochre and black swaths of paint seemingly in constant motion. This is not a landscape that can be owned. The luminous pinks and whites of Andrews’s now skull-like visage benefit the painting and its viewer but not the sitter, whose painted identity has now dissipated as surely as his own earthly remains.

Opposite – Living Room, 2015

Exhibition runs through to December 19th, 2015

Almine Rech Gallery
11 Savile Row, Mayfair
London
W1S 3PG

www.alminerech.com

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KATI HECK – INS BURO!

Posted on 2015-11-16

Born in Germany, Kati Heck is based in Antwerp, Belgium. With an intense and provocative sensibility that draws on historical precedents from Surrealism to Social Realism, Heck is a painter of astonishing facility, with an alchemical sensitivity to the human form and a devilish ironic streak. Her paintings incorporate strange scenarios, often sustained for a body of work, involving particular characters based on folks she invites into her studio. The resulting images constitute their own, highly unusual and particular world, a fantasy state, some of which is crafted in dreams. Arms are transparent, strange beasts enter the scene including an ostrich serving coffee to a couple on a futon; a young man’s pronounced varicose veins are matched by the other leg, which seems to be frozen; an animated man in a rocking chair holds a ball of light in one hand, the other submerged in a jar of pickles. This new group of works, which includes a mural-sized painting with a full range of haunting and haunted characters, conjures the supernatural in various ways, invoking a spiritual and material ecosystem as singular and peculiar as it is wondrous and open.

Opposite – Der süssliche Erinnerungsmehrwert, 2015

Exhibition runs through to January 23rd, 2016

Corbett vs. Dempsey
1120 N. Ashland Ave.
3rd Floor
Chicago
IL 60622

www.corbettvsdempsey.com

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