Ayyam Gallery Dubai (12 Alserkal Avenue) is pleased to present In the Footsteps of Cai Lun: Selected Works on Paper, a collective exhibition that highlights painters who also use drawing and printmaking as primary media.
Invoking the first-century Chinese official who revolutionised papermaking, the exhibition brings together diverse examples that form an abbreviated history of contemporary works on paper in the Middle East. The drawings and mixed-media works of seminal artists Leila Nseir, Samia Halaby, and the late Moustafa Fathi demonstrate how the use of paper in art has evolved in the Middle East over the last five decades. Pastel prints by Leila Nseir from the 1980s and 90s, for example, reveal how the influential Syrian artist has often used the medium as a means of describing the intimate dynamics of families, particularly motherhood—a subject that has been central to her artistic practice for decades. Here, the coarse marks of pastels accentuate the slight texture of the paper, adding to the laden quality of her imagery.