Main Booth | S4
Leila Heller Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Abu Dhabi Art 2022, at booth S4. Presenting an international selection of emerging, established and pioneering artists, the works exhibited envelope a multitude of cultural narratives and spark dialogue on the legacy of modernity and abstraction, aswell as its ubiquity across spatial, temporal, and material contexts. Encompassing photography, painting, and sculpture; participating artists include Robert Wilson, Darvish Fakhr, Parinaz Eleish Gharagozlou, Aref Montazeri, Marwan Sahmarani, Azza Al Qubaisi, Ana D’Castro, Naeemeh Kazemi, Melis Buyruk, Lorenzo Quinn, Reza Derakshani, Behrang Samadzadegan, Arash Nazari, Maxi Cohen, Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, Mouna Rebeiz and Sohab Sepheri.
Robert Wilson is among the world’s foremost theater and visual artists. His works for the stage unconventionally integrate a wide variety of artistic media, including dance, movement, lighting, sculpture, music and text. His images are aesthetically striking and emotionally charged, and his productions have earned the acclaim of audiences and critics worldwide.
Darvish Fakhr is a half-Iranian, half-American artist whose work ranges from painting to movement art. Throughout all his work, he fuses Western techniques with Eastern philosophies. He calls his movement art “gentle civic disruptions”. In his works, he challenges preconceptions by mocking stereotypes through humor and invention.
Parinaz Eleish Gharagozlou’s works may provoke strong emotions of nostalgia in the viewer. It is the tradition of storytelling in Iran that inspires Eleish. “Though I begin each painting with a story and an idea, at the core, I hope it is the raw emotion that will carry the viewer.” She says.
Aref Montazeri is a sculptor removed from conventional practices, he pursues a novel approach to mirror art that involves large numbers of mirror cuts and meticulous attention to detail. Conceptually, he follows an approach he has termed "The MIRROR follows narrative"; Which favours materialism over ornamentalism and resilience of design over buildability. His design apparatus consists of three criteria: Narrative, Material and Technique, which is also the way he looks at art and creates it.
Marwan Sahmarani’s practice, with the strong brushstrokes and vivid colours, reflects on the increasing political turmoil and tension felt throughout his native Lebanon. He explores the cyclical patterns of violent history manifesting throughout the Middle East so that, what persists in his practice is an expressive exploration of violence – of feeling, bodily motion, nature and its man-made counterpart.
Azza AlQubaisi is an artist, designer and entrepreneur who is popularly known as the UAE’s first Emirati jewellery designer. All her works reveal her prolific creativity, including, jewellery and sculptures made from gold, silver, wood, rubber tyres, palm trees and oudh incense. The works of AlQubaisi reflect her journey as an artist, as she explores her Emirati heritage.
Naeemeh Kazemi is an Iranian artist that focuses her art on themes of environmental anxiety, feminism, and humanity and disguises them in her enchanting paintings through tokens and motifs of the natural world, classical paintings, and quotidian objects.
Melis Buyruk primarily focuses on large-scale floral ceramic sculptures. Buyruk identifies and subtly blends patterns of vegetation and the natural world, creating porcelain flower fields. Fluctuating between boundaries of reality and surreality, these works remind viewers of our fractured and disjointed relationship with nature, and provokes a double consciousness.
Contemporary Italian artist Lorenzo Quinn is a leading figurative sculptor whose work is inspired by such masters as Michelangelo, Bernini and Rodin. Exhibited internationally, his monumental public art and smaller, more intimate pieces transmit his passion for eternal values and authentic emotions. He is best known for expressive recreations of human hands.
Persian-American artist Reza Derakshani is a renowned painter, poet, musician and performance artist. In his paintings, Derakshani recalls forgotten tales and symbols of Iran’s cultural heritage, at a time where traditions and practices are under threat and often outlawed. Through a rich iconography drawing from medieval Persian poetry, classical literature, miniature painting, and sacred architectural sites laden with meaning, Derakshani’s work celebrates both ornamentation and color fields, as the artist finds a space for figural representation in abstract aesthetics.
Behrang Samadzadegan’s work ranges from highly symbolic pieces to arrangements of stuffed- toy sculptures, to various sizes of drawings and paintings, to installations that restage ritual or historical narratives. The subject matters of his works are drawn from images and narratives of contemporary Iranian history, which he combines with fictional stories and the aesthetics of painting.
Arash Nazari is a self-taught Iranian artist. Nazari’s works are heavily influenced by Negā rgari (Persian Miniature Art). In his paintings, he brings to notice the contrast between, unique classical art of miniature opposed to color tones from contemporary minimalist art.
An Iranian painter, calligrapher and sculptor, and one of the founders of the Iranian Saqqa- khaneh movement. Zenderoudi is unquestionably a pioneer of Iranian modern art. He was included in the French magazine Connaissances des Arts list of ten best living artists, and has received many accolades and won many international awards, starting at the biennales of Venice and Sao Paolo in 1960 and 1961, when he was still in his early 20s.
Mouna Rebeiz is a Lebanese-Canadian painter based in London. In her works, both figurative and abstract, Mouna Rebeiz captures the energy. of life itself, and the life of woman, expressed at its simplest, as a universal crucible of emotions. Her great sculptures, like revisited totems, are set to the rhythms of present time in the playfulness of space
Sohrab Sepehri was a notable Iranian poet and a painter who’s considered to be one of the five most famous Iranian poets who have practiced modern poetry. Being a traveler, he studied lithography in Paris, Japanese calligraphy in Tokyo, and Buddhism in India. These cultural influences became manifest in his canvases, producing a unique painterly quality.
Maxi Cohen is an independent filmmaker, video and multimedia artist. As a media activist, her film and television work has had significant influence in creating visible social change. Maxi Cohen has been filming and photographing lush abstractions of water for more than two decades. Her works of waterfalls, oceans, rivers, deltas, hot springs and pools, yielding photographs, multimedia, video sculptures and large scale environments.
Photography Section | Farideh Lashai: Afloat Over Undulations
The current exhibition presents the concluding artworks of the late Farideh Lashai’s (1944-2014) oeuvre in six video installations. These works incorporate her artistic life: as an abstract painter, playful experimenter with new technologies and intellectual who excelled in bringing her aesthetic genius closer to her role as a writer, thinker, and translator. A prominent figure in global Modern art history, Lashai’s career was rooted in her primary education in German studies and translation. She then successfully practised design, later culminating her multifaceted artistic practice as an abstract painter.
Farideh Lashai: Afloat Over Undulations presents a seamless balance between her conceptual and historical thinking and the ever-present beauty of colour and brushstrokes. Thought-provoking work titles and video loops frame indices of painterly ventures. A playful animated rabbit leads us across works, through different times and landscapes, bringing lightness and innocence integral to the desiring curiosity of an artist's endeavours.
Passing through and beyond the political conditions of Lashai's time, the protagonist rabbit escapes into daydreaming, staring at the ungraspable, undulating reflection of moonlight. Leading further down the rabbit hole, a Cheshire cat appearing in the gestalt of the artist's native country, stares out at the viewer with mocking eyes. Lashai's ethical and aesthetic desires crystalize in her homage to Charlie Chaplin and Umm-Kulthum in the video installation, El Amal (The Desire), at the entrance to the exhibition room. The works in the exhibition are accompanied by some quotations from Lashai's best-seller, The Jackal Came, written in Persian, with an English translation forthcoming.