NEW YORK, NY.- Alexander Berggruen is presenting Alyina Zaidi: Lost in the belly of a whale. This exhibition will open Wednesday, October 16, 2024. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.

Alyina Zaidi’s painted world is a magical place that folds like fabric where the boundaries between nature, animal, pattern, and spirit are blurred. Balancing intuitive and planned approaches, with each painting, the artist revisits symbolic and spiritual motifs and unearths new ones. Zaidi’s surreal world draws from the strangeness of the world and our beliefs and practices—from social dynamics, rituals, superstitions, and natural phenomena. This strangeness influences the events that unfold in her paintings. While a whale’s belly can contain multitudes, so too does Zaidi’s world.

Her meticulous details and reverberating bright colors are inspired by a range of sources including Persian and South Asian miniature paintings, Byzantine and Sienese paintings, and her gardens in Kashmir and Delhi. Zaidi’s brief training in miniature paintings influenced her love for small details. Even in her largest painting to date Facts and hearsay—an encyclopaedia of various natural and less natural phenomena, the rigorous small scale of the rendered objects remains.

Growing up admiring the textiles her mother collected and the fabrics her godmother hand-printed, Zaidi emulates textiles in her paintings. While she continues to borrow elements from Central Asian Suzanis, she also now depicts frilly fabrics and tudor sleeves inspired by, in her words, “the sumptuous qualities of Tudor and Elizabethan paintings.” Zaidi marvels at how historically, easily transported textiles offered a rare, almost magical, opportunity to behold the cultures of another country. The silk cotton trade’s fluidity and ability to carry cultural information changed the shape of the world. It shapes Zaidi’s painted world too—her universe also seems to be mapped as if it exists on a rippling textile, where each fold offers new opportunities to open portals to different scenes across time and space. The characters who inhabit these scenes reveal that each fold is subject to its own laws of gravity.

In Lost in the belly of a whale, Zaidi establishes stronger narrative threads with more action than her previous work. Here, nomadic white strawberries attempt to herd their goats and are at war with imperial frogs. In the top left register of Facts and hearsay—an encyclopaedia of various natural and less natural phenomena, these frogs steal the moon. Angels purchase Moons for sale and, in Dubious benediction, guard pickle jars of frogs and moons. On occasion, the unreliable nature of history emerges where portions of the composition are swallowed by dark orbs Zaidi calls “the cave of the unknown.” These nebulous scenes offer a mode of abstraction for the artist and indicate that there is more to learn about this universe.

Further embracing reality-warping unknowns, Zaidi’s paintings are filled with magic and mythology. As in previous work by the artist, cherry tomatoes and radishes become spirits, angels with opulent tentacled wings populate most paintings, chilis hang to ward off the evil eye, and rituals are performed around the moon for luck. New supernatural elements in this body of work include poltergeists who lurk in windows and sacred trees. In Zaidi’s painting Euphemia and the assassin, she alludes to a version of the story of Saint Euphemia’s martyrdom in which she was thrown into an arena with lions meant to kill her. In the Islamic tradition of indirect representation, rather than painting Euphemia as a person, Zaidi paints her as a bejeweled textile surrounded by lacy fabric. In a playful rendition of the tale, here, Euphemia is cradled in a hammock of lions’ tails.

The allegories and symbols in Zaidi’s work hold unstable multiplicitous meanings. For instance, jewelry signifies power and wealth when worn by the frogs, or it acts as a benediction when gifted by angels in paintings like Dubious benediction. Meanwhile in Perfumed veils and gauzy tails, strings of pearls and chains may symbolize containment and a desire to break free.

Zaidi’s surreal universe oscillates between the macroscopic and microscopic. In her richly informational paintings, fact and fiction are muddled, as myths, hearsay, superstitions, and the unknowable reflect reality in all its multitude.

Alyina Zaidi (b. 1995, New Delhi, India) holds an MA in painting from the Royal College Of Art, London and a BA from Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; Newchild Gallery, Antwerp, BE; Indigo + Madder Gallery, London, UK; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, UK; and White Cube, London, UK, among others. Zaidi is a London-based artist from New Delhi and Srinagar.

This is Zaidi’s first solo show with the gallery, following her inclusion in the gallery's group show Katja Farin, Maria Farrar, Esme Hodsoll, Alyina Zaidi (March 1-April 5, 2023).