Ayyam Gallery Beirut is pleased to announce Drawings on Paper, the forthcoming solo show of Syrian painter Nihad Al Turk. Featuring a new body of work, the exhibition will highlight an essential component of Al Turk’s artistic practice by examining his use of drawing as a formal device that gives volume and depth to expressionist figures and objects—subjects that appear to shift in place as masses trapped in disfigured shells.
Although widely known for allegorical paintings exploring a cast of monstrous, semi-autobiographical characters, Al Turk recently produced a series of large ink and acrylic drawings that chronicle the current conflict in Syria from its early days as a popular uprising to its current state as an all-consuming war. In place of detailing recent events from the vantage point of traditional documentary modes, however, the artist depicts the ways in which such violence is internalised by those who experience it firsthand. Rendering the daily impact of large-scale devastation as a process of malformation that transforms the body, Al Turk draws the physicality of his subjects with the solidity and organic contours of weathered boulders. The artist’s protagonists seem to bear the scars of the conflict, their faces rendered as illegible maps of ruin. The series comprises portraits of known martyrs, anonymous witnesses, and key figures of the war, each with swollen faces, and many posed with the gesture of victory, a two-finger salute that indicates the steadfastness of his vanquished subjects.
