NYAB Event - Yassine Mekhnache Exhibition

Yassine Mekhnache Exhibition

Catherine Ahnell Gallery

This event has ended.

Yassine, one of the most popular young artists working in France today, debuts at the Catherine Ahnell Gallery located at 66 Grand Street with new, complex, multilayered abstract paintings that are immediately virulent,
hypnotic, cross-cultural and lyrical. Yassine’s colors reach to carnal desire, filled with all shades of intensity while his sweeping gestures keep observations moving within the work, as if physically engaging. Hot yellow builds an intensity to the ardor of red while the scales of blue and gray subdue the viewing experience.

As a wanderer Yassine started exploring emotionally charged art in the streets of his home, Lyon, before shifting into the scope of fine art. He does not commit himself to entirely one medium. In a gesture similar to street art, Yassine incorporates traditional Moroccan embroideries into the surface of each piece that are painted over with different colors: traces of the exotic merge with the artist’s fierce physical process, swirling and charging across each canvas, while rendering a hypnotic visual dialogue.

Gallery owner Regis Krampf has said, “Yassine is not the first artist to call to our unconscious, but never in my opinion, has anyone played with the idea of the painting as accident, and controlled gesture, with such success rate.” The splash and saturation of Yassine’s new large-scale paintings also symbolize the vibrant beat of the city. The artist’s incorporation of Moroccan embroidery also sets his work free from the framework of traditional painting, transforming his canvases into sites where East meets West. Each painting becomes even more personal through the artist’s subtle application of mark that renders the vestige of a portrait, first emerging but then disappearing into clouds of color.

As a self-taught artist, Yassine’s art has appeared in numerous exhibitions since 1997. He has pursued residencies at “AL MAQAM” in Morocco and Villa Abdelatif in Algeria. Yassine’s paintings are included in the collections of Agnès b., Marrianne Orlowsky and Jérémy Rocher, and the Musee d’art contemporain d’Alger. His most recent solo exhibition LYFE appeared in 2011 at Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève in Paris. In 2009 Galerie L.J. in Paris debuted the artist’s combinations of Moroccan embroideries in a solo show Piece of Me. In November 2012 Yassine’s art was represented by Regis Krampf at the Istanbul Art Fair. He had a solo show at the Krampf Gallery in January 2013.