October Gallery at Abu Dhabi Art '24 | Booth M5
20th – 24th November, 2024
VIP Previews: 19th – 20th November, 2024
VIP Previews: 19th – 20th November, 2024
Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm.
Highlights include powerful works by Golnaz Fathi, an influential member of an invigorating group of contemporary artists that has come to prominence in Iran over the last two decades. Many of Fathi’s latest works on canvas show script that has been painted over or deliberately erased by superimposed layers. These deliberate abstractions are incapable of being parsed or otherwise understood. Sunlight, 2022, exemplifies the artist’s powerful application of primary hues; rendered in bright yellows, the work is suggestive both of warmth and the raging heat of the sun, while a swathe of red alludes to the vitality of life. Fathi’s works challenge each viewer to discover entirely new levels of significance for themselves and reference intense personal feelings about life and the complex interrelationships that link peoples and places.
An arresting large-scale, mixed-media ‘portrait’ of the African diaspora is presented by Alexis Peskine. His works are rendered by hammering nails of different gauge, with pin-point accuracy, into wooden ‘canvases’. The application of Japanese oxidised gold, silver and palladium leaf to the heads of the nails lends a luminous quality to each work. Peskine links these extraordinary portraits to the spiritually charged Minkisi ‘power figures’ of the Congo Basin. His sensitive portraits of the people he meets inform the rich diversity of subjects adorning his sculptural pieces. The sheer self-possession of these vital Black figures’ gaze rivets our attention by suggesting a transcendent, interior power of resilience. Recently Forest Figures, Peskine’s third solo exhibition at October Gallery was presented from 3rd October – 9th November, 2024.
Renowned artist Rachid Koraïchi is represented by selected works on canvas inspired by the nasibs that the 12th century Sufi mystic and writer, Ibn ‘Arabi, set down in his book of love poems, The Interpreter of Desires (1215). Les ailes bleues des Anges (11) (The Blue of Angels' Wings), 2022, is a large, square canvas which presents an original design produced in white on an indigo blue ground that improvises upon one of the original poems. The pieces exhibited are from a new body of work which was first shown earlier this year at October Gallery in Koraïchi’s mesmerising exhibition Celestial Blue. Rather than being a direct translation, each work becomes a sustained reflection on the profundity of Ibn ‘Arabi’s original vision, offering a visual correlative to the ideas expressed in a modified, entirely contemporary form. Koraïchi’s creative explorations have employed an impressive range of media, which include paintings on canvas, paper and silk, bronze, wood and steel sculptures, ceramics and textiles.
Also presented are paintings by Govinda Sah ‘Azad’, an artist from Nepal who is known for his paintings of intriguing combinations of ongoing metaphysical musings about the nature of reality and insights into his local environment in Margate, where the famous English artist J. M. W. Turner once resided. Sah often works outside, where the change in the colour of light is more profound. His work is presented in JMW Turner and changing visions of landscape, a major new exhibition exploring artists' approaches to landscape from the 17th century to the present day at Norwich Museum which opened 19th October, 2024 and continues until 23rd February, 2025.
Jukhee Kwon’s primary material comes from unused and abandoned books, which, by skilful slicing and precision cutting, she transforms into captivating pieces that inhabit their surroundings. Furthermore, nothing is lost or wasted as newly sculpted forms are discovered. The artist plays constantly with ideas of complementarity: destruction & re-creation, birth & death and other natural cycles. Crystal Book, 2023, is an elegant work made by patiently manipulating paper by hand, creating a sculpture that surges from the book’s spine to cascade in delicate, paper tendrils.
