Press Release
Lawrie Shabibi presents Blue from 21st November till 7 January
BLUE
Shaikha Al Mazrou | Driss Ouadahi
Shahpour Pouyan | Su Yu-Xin
This November Lawrie Shabibi presents Blue, an exhibition that explores the dialectic between meaning and visual sensation. Saturated with meanings – freedom, intuition, imagination, expansiveness, inspiration, sadness, faith, spirituality, wisdom, peace, serenity, ethereality, infinity to name just a few – blue has more complex and contradictory connotations than any other colour. Always among the most costly, scarce and difficult to extract, it has kept its cachet across the centuries and individual artists continue to respond to it.
Blue, the forthcoming exhibition at Lawrie Shabibi, is dominated by the colour in its various hues and brings together works by a multi-generational group of artists – Shaikha Al Mazrou (b. 1988), Driss Ouadahi (b. 1959), Shahpour Pouyan (b. 1979) and Su Yu-Xin (b. 1991).
Driss Ouadahi presents two paintings – Errance / Wandering (2018) and Au Fur et à Mesure (2018). Known for his depictions of brutalist structures and the built environment of urban alienation, Ouadahi’s more recent works are devoid of social commentary, focusing instead on colour, light and transparency, engendering a transcendental feeling through visual sensation.
Similarly, in Unfolded (2020) Su Yu-Xin explores the relationship between visual language and sensory perception, constructing a delicate alternation of horizons, within which varying distances elicit different modes of observation.
A group of Miniatures by Shahpour Pouyan, made after a unique and highly unusual manuscript in the Bibliotheque National in Paris, continue a series began in 2008. Pouyan digitally and manually manipulates the images to remove the figures and their attributes. Without their protagonists, what is left are arresting monochrome skyscapes of saturated blue, resembling colour field paintings in miniature.
Finally, Blue presents two recent bodies of work by Shaikha Al Mazrou – two blue resin sculptures, Sky And Ocean And Everything In Between (2020), and a series of cyanotypes, Despite The Weather (2020). Minimal in their aesthetics, poetic in their meaning, the works investigate the perception of colour and the irony between literal meaning and spontaneous perceptions in art.
OPENS 21 NOV 2020 10am-10pm
ON VIEW UNTIL 7 JAN 2021 – Saturday/Thursday 10am-6pm
WHERE: Alserkal Avenue
Please wear a face mask and keep a safe distance of 2 metres from others at all times.
IMAGE: Su Yu-Xin, Unfolded, 2020, Oil and acrylic on flax, 115 x 200 cm