Leila Heller Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in the twelvth edition of Art Dubai with a presentation in the Contemporary section of the fair.
PRIVATE DAYS (by invitation only)
Monday, March 19, 6.30-8.30pm: Art Dubai Modern Preview
Tuesday, March 20, 3-9.30pm: Art Dubai Preview
Tuesday, March 20, Jumeirah Patrons Preview
Tuesday, March 20, 7pm: The Abraaj Group Art Prize Unveiling
VERNISSAGE (by invitation only)
Wednesday, March 21, 1-4pm: Ladies Day Preview (open to all ladies)
Wednesday, March 21, 4-9.30pm: VIP Opening
PUBLIC DAYS
Wednesday, March 21, 4- 9.30pm
Thursday, March 22, 4-9.30pm
Friday, March 23, 2-9.30pm
Saturday, March 24, 12-6.30pm
Art Dubai Contemporary | Booth A8
For Art Dubai 2018, Leila Heller Gallery is presenting new works from artists including Reza Aramesh, Tara Donovan, Jacob Hashimoto, Rashid Rana, Kenny Scharf, Sudarshan Shetty, and Philip Taaffe.
Reza Aramesh’s interdisciplinary practice represents the abjection of human bodies sustained during armed conflict and torture. He blends classical aesthetics with anonymous figures from the contemporary moment, thereby bringing to the fore the victims who have been rendered invisible, yet at the same time questioning the traditional representation of suffering throughout the Western art historical canon. For Art Dubai, we will be showcasing a photographic triptych, depicting Palestinians waiting at the Rafah border point to cross into Egypt from the Gaza Strip.
Images of oppression and violence have been ubiquitous in Reza Aramesh’s work. This large-scale photographic tryptich, a format commonly reserved for celebratory purposes continues the artist’s multi-faceted explorations of the human ability to inflict suffering.
For the last 20 years, Tara Donovan (b. 1969, New York) has used simple, mass produced materials and objects to explore the transformative effects of accumulation and aggregation. Known for her commitment to process, Donovan has earned acclaim for her ability to discover the inherent physical characteristics of an object and transform it into art. Donovan has explored the effects of accumulation with these materials, at times utilizing hundreds of thousands of units such as straws, pins, or cups to generate perceptual phenomena and subtle atmospheric effects.
Donovan’s many accolades include the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award (2008) and the first annual Calder Prize (2005), among others. She has been the subject of several major solo exhibitions at museums including the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2015); Milwaukee Art Museum (2012); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2007), UCLA Hammer Museum (2004), and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1999). Donovan’s first European exhibition was presented in 2013 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, and traveled to the Arp Museum Bahnhof, Rolandseck, Remagen, Germany. In September of 2018, her work will be presented in the solo exhibition Tara Donovan: Fieldwork at Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver.
Trees, clouds, grass, sky: everything dies, except in the art of Jacob Hashimoto, whose gesture toward landscape only underlies the artifice of its form and the viewer’s contemporary alienation from its function. The artist seeks to uncover the underlying prismatic influence of the technological on our contemporary understanding of the tipsy threshold between the natural and artificial within digitalization of experience.
Jacob Hashimoto was born in Greeley, Colorado in 1973 and is a graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Queens, New York. Hashimoto has been featured in solo museum exhibitions at MOCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Schauwerk Sindlefingen in Germany, and the Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art in Finland. He has also had solo shows at Mary Boone Gallery in New York, Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, Studio la Città in Verona, Galerie Forsblom in Helsinki and Anglim Gilbert Gallery in San Francisco, among others. His work is in the collections of LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art, EMMA - Saastamoinen Foundation, Schauwerk Sindelfingen, The California Endowment, and numerous other public collections.
Rashid Rana’s splicing and stitching technique feels violent as it tears apart and reassembles photographs of canonical art historical and contemporary imagery. Utilising the grid structure, the artist scrambles the famous compositions and rearranges them into pixelated and codified puzzles. Rana’s Transliteration Series reimagines pre-existing imagery into digital fields of form and colour that he can play with. Rana’s technique of image-making is not simply a formal device: it is an act of subversion that literally breaks apart and puts together the original image that creates a new image telling a different story. The strategy creates intended and unintended pairings whereby pictorial language from a particular time and place in history finds itself reborn and re-examined through the lens of another set of spatial and temporal coordinates.
Born in Hollywood, California in 1958, Kenny Scharf lives and works in Los Angeles, California and New York, New York. A muralist, painter, sculptor, and installation artist, best known for his fantastical, large-scale paintings of anthropomorphic animals and imagined creatures, Kenny Scharf rose to prominence alongside his friends and contemporaries Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring in the East Village art scene of the 1980s. One of the first artists to inject elements of street culture into the mainstream of contemporary art, Scharf has continued to pioneer projects like his Cosmic Cavern—a now legendary all-night DayGlo disco party held in the basement of a Brooklyn warehouse from 2009-2010. His paintings incorporate imagery from advertisements, cartoons and classic Americana into exuberant compositions with an underlying subversive edge.
His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions and he has had solo exhibitions at Pasadena Museum of California Art (2004); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles (2001); Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (1999); The Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida (1997); University Galleries of Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois (1997); Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico (1996); and Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (1995) among other locations around the world.
Born in 1961 in Mangalore, India, Sudarshan Shetty lives and works in Mumbai. Shetty initially trained as a painter, later turning to sculpture and installations which now account for all of his practice. A conceptual artist, he is renowned for his enigmatic and often mechanized sculptural installations, Shetty explores the fundamental ontological challenges presented by our immersion in a world of objects. His hybrid constructions question the fusion of Indian and Western traditions as well as exploring domestic concerns and the notion of movement. Large sculptural installations and multimedia works define Sudarshan Shetty’s oeuvre, often employing assemblages of quotidian objects that suggest new possibilities of meaning and perception, through diverse approaches that have included sculptural and architectural elements.
He has exhibited widely in India and around the world. His recent shows include ‘A Song A Story’ for the Rolls-Royce Art Programme (2016), ‘Shoonya Ghar – Empty Is This House’, NGMA, New Delhi and at the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016), ‘Mimic Momento’, Galerie Daniel Templon, Brussels (2015),‘Constructs Constructions’, curated by Roobina Karode, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2015), ‘A Passage’ Staatliche Museum, Schwerin, Germany (2015), ‘Critical Mass’, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2012), San Francisco (2011), ‘Paris-Delhi-Bombay’, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011), ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, curated by Walter Vanhaerents and Pierre-Olivier Rollin, Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels (2011), ‘India Inclusive’, World Economic Forum, Davos (2011), ‘Contemplating the Void’, curated by Nancy Spector, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010)), among others.
Best known for his skillful fusion of techniques, Philip Taaffe has mastered a wide range of processes; including collage, linocut, woodblock, rubber stamp, silkscreen, and marbling — all interwoven into richly complex and highly meditative canvases. He assimilates images, symbols and signs from various sources, transferring them to paper and canvas. Taaffe strives for a visual energy and an optical vibrancy that integrate the decorative with the narrative, and the ancient with the modern – entwining cultural lineages and histories to create something authentic from these interwoven sources.
Philip Taaffe was born in 1955 in Elizabeth, New Jersey (USA), and lives and works in New York City and West Cornwall, Connecticut. Taaffe derives inspiration from a variety of sources, including Islamic architecture, Pompeiian mosaics, 1960s Op Art, and nineteenth century monographs on natural history. He has been included in numerous museum exhibitions, including the Carnegie International, two Sydney Biennials, and three Whitney Biennials. In 1990 his work was the subject of an extensive critical study in Parkett no. 26 (Zurich & New York). His work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Reina Sofia, Madrid. In the year 2000, the IVAM museum in Valencia organized a retrospective survey of his work. In 2001 an extensive survey of his work was presented by the Galleria Civica of Trento, Italy. In 2008 the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg organized a retrospective survey, The Life of Forms in Art: Paintings 1980-2008.
About the Gallery:
Since its establishment over three decades ago in New York, Leila Heller Gallery has gained worldwide recognition as a pioneer in promoting creative dialogue and exchange between Western artists and Middle Eastern, Central and Southeast Asian artists. It has garnered a reputation for identifying and cultivating the careers of artists leaving a lasting impact on contemporary art and culture. Currently representing a diverse roster of Western and Middle Eastern artists, the gallery is also active in the American, European and Middle Eastern secondary art markets. In November 2015, Leila Heller Gallery opened its first international location in Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue. At 14,000 square feet, the state of the art gallery features three exhibition spaces, making it the largest gallery in the UAE. Showcasing leading regional and international artists, many of whom will be presenting their work in the Middle East for the first time, the gallery is dedicated to supporting the evolving practice of established artists.