LONDON.- Gazelli Art House announces the launch of Places for NOVA, Saad Qureshi’s first major public artwork, commissioned by Land Securities. This site-specific installation centred around Sir Simon Milton Square and the public realm areas at NOVA, Victoria, will be in place until April 2018.
“The project looks at the portability of landscapes, and the human mind as a vehicle that allows places to travel, to be carried in the memory from one location to another,” Qureshi explains.
As part of the development period for this exciting project, the artist launched a call to people who live, work and travel through Victoria to donate a memory of a significant landscape that they no longer have access to. He then reimagined these to create a series of universal “mindscapes” housed in six custom-designed corten- steel vitrines that function as panoramic portals to alternative, hybrid worlds.
The result of these conversations is a work that is firmly rooted in the community that coheres around this brand new quarter of London at the very moment of its coming into being, and recreated daily in the minds of those who interact physically and imaginatively with it.
Alongside this and until 16 April, Gazelli Art House is hosting time | memory | landscape, the first international presentation of Qureshi’s new drawings and works on paper. A series of monumental drawings on wood explore the artist’s enduring fascination with memory and its reinterpretation of landscapes, echoing themes explored in Places for NOVA. The works exploit the experiential qualities of wood and the powdery luminescence of brick dust, a building material transformed into a pigment. They are complemented by 6 drawings of places entirely imagined by the artist, rendered in his innovative “scorched line” technique. Evocations rather than depictions, they are meditations on the cadences of landscape, and how their rhythms unfold in the mind.
The artist, who has recently been awarded a prestigious new commission for a permanent sculpture for Oxford Brookes University, will be available to speak about his work and the influences behind it.
Since graduating with an MFA from The Slade School of Fine Art in 2010, Saad Qureshi (b. 1986; United Kingdom) has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. Group exhibitions include the Venice Biennale 2015, Saatchi Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, Royal British Society of Sculptors, the Barbican, Patrick Heide CA, Red Mansion Foundation, Modern Art Oxford, White Project Gallery (Paris), Centrale Montemartini (Rome), and the Museum voor Moderne Kunst (Arnhem). Qureshi’s works are held in the Farjam Foundation Collection (Dubai), the Dipti Mathur Collection (California), the Creative Cities Collection (Beijing) and the Boston Consulting Group Collection, as well as other private collections. Prizes include Arts Council England Research Award, AHRC Postgraduate Award, the Red Mansion Foundation Prize, and the Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary Award and residencies include the BBC2 “School of Saatchi” (London) and the International Art Zone, (Beijing).
