Nadia Ayari "This Place"
Monya Rowe Gallery
This event has ended.
The complex interlacing of meaning and association in Ayari’s representations belies the compositional simplicity demonstrated by many of her canvasses. Because Ayari’s signature forms are frequently reincorporated into her ongoing body of work, the appreciation of any given painting benefits from a knowledge of the artist’s visual archive and larger oeuvre. The show’s title piece, for instance, closely resembles a smaller canvass entitled “Blue Eyes” constructed of a similarly patterned field of curvilinear shapes painted in colors reminiscent of the cityscape of Sidi Bou Said, the small Tunisian town, featured elsewhere in Ayari’s work, where André Gide famously sat out the war years. If the blue and white of this previous work directly references the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of what is now a much photographed tourist destination in Ayari’s country of origin, then the fleshy pink of “This Place” gives the alluringly reworked forms a breast-like appearance that symbolically affirms the sense in which the title can be read as a veiled allusion to the "motherland."
[Image: Nadia Ayari 2010 "Alone" Oil on canvas 78.5 by 76 in.]
Media
Schedule
from February 25, 2011 to April 30, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-02-25 from 18:00 to 20:00