Ayyam Gallery invites everyone to attend its current group exhibition titled An Ode to Portraiture. This summer collective features seven Middle Eastern artists: Afshin Pirhashemi, Safwan Dahoul, Elias Izoli, Kais Salman, Khaled Takreti, Nihad Al Turk, and Sadik Kwaish Alfraji. As the exhibition title suggests, the participating artists display their portrait artworks demonstrating various portraiture styles. The show will run through 8 September 2023.
About the participants
Afshin Pirhashemi (b. 1974, Urmia, Iran) is a painter residing in Tehran. In his art, he explores the difficulties of life in modern-day Iran, manifestations of power, and issues of contemporary social and political identity. The artist is fascinated by the role of a woman in modern Iranian society and their struggles. It is clearly illustrated by his artworks, mostly monochromatic photo-realistic portraits of women positioned on minimalist backgrounds.
Safwan Dahoul (b. 1961, Hama, Syria) is among the most prominent painters in the Middle East. He predominantly employs acrylic on canvas to create his enigmatic melancholic and monochromatic art pieces. The list of things that have had influence on his art includes Picasso’s Cubist style and Assyrian and Pharaonic art. In the 80s, Dahoul began his ongoing Dream series dedicated to the dream state. In the works from this series, he investigates the physical and psychological effects of alienation, solitude, and longing.
Elias Izoli (b. 1976, Syria) is a realist painter born in Damascus, where he still lives and works. In his art, he comments on the rise of consumerist escapism which harms our capacity for compassion and empathy. Influenced by the Syrian war, the motif of children caught in the crossfire of violence is recurring in the artist’s work. The children and young people he depicts seem to evoke a sense of intrusion in the spectator while building an empathetic connection between the two. Using a muted palette and applying paints through fragmented brushstrokes, Izoli enhances the melancholy, loss, and sadness his subjects express.
Kais Salman (b. 1976, Tartous, Syria), one of his motherland’s key expressionist artists, still resides in Syria. In his art described as monochromatic abstract expressionism, he employs satire to fight the normalisation of greed, narcissism, and ideological extremism. The artist sheds light on a world of ugliness through hyperbolised imagery. The themes he addresses in his work are political corruption, consumerism, cosmetic surgery, imperialism, and others.
Khaled Takreti (b. 1964, Beirut, Lebanon) is a famous Syrian artist based in Paris, France. His oeuvre mostly comprises large-scale realistic female portraits characterised by Pop Art aesthetics. The artist says that he has always depicted the East as a woman “through her eyes, her soul and her stillness.” In Takreti’s art pieces, a personal narrative and explorations of the modern social image are merged.
Nihad Al Turk (b. 1972, Aleppo, Syria) is a Kurdish Syrian artist and sculptor living and working in Beirut, Lebanon. He draws inspiration from literature and philosophy (especially existentialism) and calls his psychological artworks allegorical self-portraits. The main theme the artist explores in his work is the endurance of man amidst the power struggles of good and evil. It is not only human figures what Al Turk’s paintings depict but also some imperfect creatures and demons. Impacted by his experience as a refugee (he had to flee Syria because of the civil war), the artist uses “distorted shapes and writhing lines to express the struggles of a captive creature seeking to burst its bonds.”
Sadik Kwaish Alfraji (b. 1960, Baghdad, Iraq) is a multi-media artist from the Netherlands. His practice engages drawing, painting, animation, video production, photography, and graphic and installation art. He is known for his existential artworks with black shadowy figures as protagonists that embody human fragility. Through his art, Alfraji delves into not only the vulnerability of human existence but also such themes as loss, exile, fragmentation, and displacement.
To get more information about An Ode to Portraiture, please visit the exhibition’s official web page.
You may also be interested in visiting Light Through the Wounds at Foundry.
