Leila Heller Gallery Dubai showcases artworks in New York’s Armory Show
- 05 Sep 2021
Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer
Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai, is taking part in The Armory Show, at Javits Center, New York, USA (Sept. 9 — 12). In its Armory booth, the gallery is presenting a dialogue between light and reflection.
Its selection of light works on the walls will reflect onto reflective sculptures, in a range of materials positioned throughout the booth, creating an immersive experience of light and connecting works by artists around the world.
Grimanesa Amoros is a New York-based American interdisciplinary artist with diverse interests in the fields of social history, scientific research and critical theory.
She has often drawn upon Peruvian cultural legacies as the inspiration for her large-scale light installations, which she has presented around the globe.
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Through her art, where one feels that the past is meeting the future, she conveys a sense of ephemeral wonder, attracting viewers from different backgrounds and communities, to inspire them to become agents of empowerment.
Amoros makes use of sculpture, video and lighting to create works that illuminate notions of personal identity and community.
Tarik Currimbhoy searches for tranquility, simplicity and tactility in his kinetic sculptures, expressed in purity of both form and material. Inspired by ancient architecture of building blocks resting on each other in tension and compression, his sculptures began as “stories of structure and gravity”, held together under compression in stone.
They became the genesis for studies in metal, which could express these concepts in dynamic fashion and sensual form. Reza Derakshani, born in Iran, is a painter, musician and performance artist.
In his “Day and Night” series, he explores opposing themes of the world. While aesthetically ornamented, his paintings express a duality of experiences and reflect the fullness and ambiguity of life. Inserting subjectivity through expressive brushstrokes, while interweaving strong colours, textures and luxurious metal paints, Derakshani’s paintings often mimic poetry and music.
For the artist, painting is a spiritual process that allows for a return to physicality and beauty, in a rejection of the irony that often permeates contemporary painting.
Rachel Lee Hovnanian is a Miami-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores contemporary notions of narcissism, obsession and intimacy, and society’s sometimes alienating addiction to modern technological advances and media.
She navigates the post-internet world, merging photography, video, sculpture, painting and installation art, into surreal environments that challenge viewers to examine and reevaluate their own cultural values and relationship with digital technology.
American historian Judith Stein described her as “a wizard at fingering uncomfortable truths.”
Ran Hwang’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in the philosophy of Zen Buddhism. He ponders themes of cyclicality, appreciating time’s ephemerality in his works.
Her installations serve as monuments to a human’s perpetual attempts to capture and prolong a fleeting moment. In this case, the cherry blossoms are subjects of Hwang’s series as they represent nature’s vulnerability to imperfect conditions and the inevitability of life’s transient nature.
In her Cherry Blossoms, the artist hopes to convey a meditative state to the audience, inviting the viewer to trace the delicate motions of the blossom’s falling petals which have succumbed to the imminent progression of time.
Dr Haresh Lalvani, collaborating with renowned art-metal fabricator Milgo-Bufkin, has been creating unique sculptures that comprise a substantial body of work.
His work being shown at Armory exemplifies the artist’s groundbreaking work and his original artistic processes derived directly from a quest inspired by nature’s designs, its generative principles and formal codes.
He is an artist-inventor, design scientist and an architect-morphologist, who navigates the space between Art and Science comfortably and uniquely to create original works.
Leila Pazooki’s work is primarily an inquiry into the concept of borders and the manner in which information, language, visual vernacular and cultural associations are contorted and conflated, as they cross physical and imaged boundaries.
Borders establish limitations and her work — often consisting of layered ‘forbidden’ images manipulated to veil their illicit content — questions the notion and validity of acceptability.
As such, Pazooki’s multi-layered works serve to dissolve the distinction between what is tolerable and what is taboo. More recently, the exploration of borders has brought her to consider media and the perceptions, paradigms, cognitive processes and associated relationships that are stimulated and maintained.
Deeply cosmopolitan, her works can be read as visual material aiding in the fight against the hegemony of borders that stratify the world by way of political and canonical prejudices.
Mia Fonssagrives Solow is an American contemporary artist based in New York and Paris. She is internationally renowned for her refined and whimsical aesthetic in both figurative and abstract forms in a range of mediums, from polished bronze to gilded wood to sleek enamel over fiberglass.
Solow’s maquettes examine the simplicity of scale and movement, form and colour. The curving surfaces of each piece draw the eye from one line to the next, as everyday objects, such as a sail or an apple, are refined to simply the clean, essential lines of their forms.
The Armory Show presents the world’s leading international galleries, showcasing works from both modern masters and cutting-edge contemporary artists. It attempts to help the art market thrive through making, buying, selling and discovering art, more accessible.