NEW YORK, NY.- Taymour Grahne Gallery presents Bricks, a solo exhibition of new thick oil paintings, watercolors, and sculptures by Brooklyn-based artist Nadia Ayari.
Marking the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Ayari uses her practice to explore the intersection between primary forms: the fig, branch and blood. Employing images of submission and isolation, her paintings are stilled in (or out of) time— relating conceptual narratives of love and captivity. Taking on further abstract qualities in this body of work, Ayari finds clarity in her form making. Her saturated palette and contrasting hues suggest a deeper, more accute relationship to the formal qualities of each shape. Art writer Kareem Estefan considers in his accompanying exhibition catalog essay, “In her hands, the lush fruit aggregates poetic associations with sexuality and mystery, snowballing into a series of metaphors through its material repetitions and juxtapositions. Circumscribed by an evenly partitioned, elliptical leaf, a sturdy branch, and rivulets of blood, the spherical fig emerges as an eyeball amid lips and limbs. But the bodily grammar of these paintings is far from fixed; like elements of language, Ayari’s figures partake in a differential geometry, defining themselves in relation. They play on a shifting terrain of translucence and opacity, evoking erotic power and openness at one moment, vulnerability and confinement in the next.”
Daniel Feinberg, a Miami-based poet, also writes about this repetition in the same publication, “A world repeating itself as intonation in fruit and branch, brick and sand, form and portal: eyelash in the unknown. A palette so consistent in its vision, purple, green, dark green, that a bondage in purpose tightens toward a mystery in mimesis. Yes, being outside of time through the jouissance of submission and domination is a super natural thing. A fleshed out anarchy appearing and reappearing and captive in Ayari’s succinct strokes. This rigorous wilderness is painted somewhere between the two false myths of origin and ending: art forms that hang and ripen in the reality of necromantic red renewal. A supple Euclidian space time full of erotic cuts and curves that affirm an occult art cultivated to transform if not transcend."
The show takes its title from the structure of architectural elements Ayari has placed in the gallery: a collection of bricks. Gathered over the space of a year, the compulsion to accumulate these nineteenth century blocks came after Ayari created outdoor frescoes on her Brooklyn roof. Displaying the collection here, suggests the social dimension of this urban practice while the solidity of the bricks engages the abstract and repetitive aspects of the paintings, watercolors and sculptures.
Ayari earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2007) and has been a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawing (2006), the Fine Arts Work Center (2010) and AiR Dubai (2014). She has had solo projects at Luce, Turin (2009), Monya Rowe, New York (2011) and The Third Line, Dubai (2013), and has participated in the 12th International Cairo Biennale (2010), the 3rd Thessaloniki Biennale (2011) and Art Dubai Projects (2014). Her work has also been exhibited in venues including the Saatchi Gallery, London, and Monica DeCardenas, Zuoz and Gallery Diet, Florida. She also co-runs S2A, a project space and collective based in New York where she currently lives and works.
