Ayyam Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in the 13th edition of Art Dubai f rom 20 – 23 March, 2019 at Madinat Jumeirah with a solo presentation by Samia Halaby
About the Show
Samia Halaby’s newest body of work reflects on her current season of life; they are her ripest paintings yet, brimming with refined simplicity and intuitive complexity. They are a honing of her aesthetic journey to represent the general in nature without any superfluity: a result of the decades of teaching herself to see. Yet, they hold an incredible variety of intricate moving parts, unplanned and difficult to explain, that twirl and swirl together like her favorite dish: a bowl of soft Soba noodles. This seeming contradiction itself embodies the simplicity and complexity of Halaby’s latest work.
Continuing with her previous exploration of transparency and patterns, the artist intends to capture the simultaneous presence of shapes distinguishable by color that co-exist in one canvas and imitate her daily activities. By allowing semi-transparent layers to overlap and illustrate degrees of density and softness, Halaby provokes our consciousness to consider our interactions with social and physical environments.
Halaby’s methodical compositions also introduce a blossoming component to her work, where the artist focuses intensely on how we perceive distance and location, examining division of space; moving towards and away from locations marked by visible or audible objects. This idea – which extended its first roots in her kinetic work of the 1980s – is most prominently explored in the large painting Simultaneous Depth, partially inspired by the geometry of Islamic panels and its elements, where she allows shapes to interpenetrate; to call and respond; reverberate; overlap and be repeated. In works as such, a general division of space controls the whole but the facture of each general section is composed of parts that echo one another within their location. Thus creating an invisible set of relationships that our eyes measure and our minds comprehend intuitively.