Ayyam Gallery Beirut is pleased to announce LOL, the solo show of leading Syrian artist Khaled Takreti, opening on 11 September. Featuring a new series of works, the exhibition will highlight a recent development in Takreti’s painting style as he enters the second phase of his twenty-year oeuvre. Expanding his focus on sociocultural themes, which emerged in his previous body of work, Complete Freedom (2013), his latest paintings employ a new postmodern aesthetic, one that evokes the desensitised, image-saturated age of today.
Deconstructing the formal properties of painting, Takreti sources imagery from a variety of media then creates collaged stencils as outlines for his compositions. Figures and objects are paired with minimal reference to tangible spaces and painted with photographic precision, a breakdown of illusionism that is visible in his earlier works but further reduced in order to allude to the artifice of advertising, social media, and popular culture. Through such formalism, Takreti blurs the line between fine art and mass media and depicts modern life as a tableau of the absurd riddled with anxiety.
