FRANKFURT.- Bernhard Knaus Fine Art announces the first solo show by Swiss artist Karim Noureldin at the gallery.

Since the 1990s Karim Noureldin has been confronting the drawing with architectural spaces. Many of his works are attempts to remove the drawing from its traditional paper basis and to anchor it in its surrounding architectural context by means of installation-based interventions.

With their complex constructions offering interpretations of spatial perspective, these generally large-scale works create independent pictorial forms in the space, which superimpose themselves as autonomous painterly-illustrative structures over the given architectural situation and enter a fascinating dynamic between image, architecture and space.

For the gallery space at Bernhard Knaus Fine Art, Noureldin has developed a color concept that can be read as both a background and a site-specific installation. A neutral gray tone covers parts of the walls and simultaneously defines their dimensions, as other architectural elements and modules of the space remain untouched. The small-format works on paper installed in the space are part of the artist's latest series, entitled “Play”, and were all produced in early 2016. Here, various pictorial structures and a range of different paper qualities come together and investigate color, ornamentation and abstract image-space compositions, all of which could in the broadest sense be interpreted as “sound images”. They enter into dialog with two older large-format drawings, titled “Evo”, which form the link between format, color and monochrome, planarity, pictorial depth and image space and, owing to their large format, enable the drawing to become part of an installation construct with its surrounding exhibition space.

Karim Noureldin, born in 1967 in Zurich, lives in Lausanne. He studied Fine Arts in Zurich and Basel.

He has spent time in New York, Rome, Cairo and London and his works have been shown in museums and galleries in Europe and North America, including Kunsthalle Basel; Kunstmuseum Winterthur and Museum Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur, Kunstmuseum Bonn; L’espace de l’art concret, Mouans-Sartoux; Kunstmuseum Zander, Bergisch-Gladbach; Musée d art moderne et contemporain MAMCO and Musée Rath, Geneva; Musee cantonale de Beaux-Arts MCBA, Lausanne, Swiss Institute SI, New York and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Cambrai.