 |
Email PageSabhan Adam: Painting With Smoke
September 4, 2008- October 11, 2008
Reception: September 4, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Sabhan Adam
Cavin-Morris Gallery
210 11th AveSABHAN ADAM: PAINTING WITH SMOKE September 4 – October 11, 2008
Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to present the paintings and drawings of the singular self-taught artist, Sabhan Adam. His subjects mostly figurative seem to live in a place that tears the watcher out of complacency into an uncomfortable almost hallucinogenic plane of existence where any reference to beauty depends on a level of discomfiture.
There is anger, a righteous anger that is tempered by a sharp-edged sense of humor. The work seethes with an almost literary sense of cosmic punishment meted out by an unfriendly universe that shares a distant relationship with Kafka’s post-Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa or the caterpillar in Through The Looking Glass. We are ushered into an unnamable place where caricature becomes very serious.
There isn’t other work like Sabhan Adam’s coming out of the Arab World right now. His polemic is human and generalized rather than strictly local. There is very little sacred geometry in what he does, and what he depicts is an expressionistic distortion of the human form. He has a sensitivity to costume in an off-kilter way that is as rich as embroidery. His figures rise from the canvas like djinn. They come from a place that is earthly and metaphysical simultaneously. An earlier exhibition of his work was entitled “Ethereal”, an especially relevant term because it is so easy to get engrossed in the non-empirical enigmas of the work that one can forget how skillfully they are made. It is as if Adam were drawing with a paint made of smoke and tar.
Perhaps his words say it best:
The only thing I own is my drawing. Most of people sit on chairs, talk numb and don’t understand what I am going through, and that blood is coming out of my eyes. Only my parents saw me drawing.” Another silence, then: “in the middle of the vertigo of my spirit, a path takes form and leads the way.” He hesitates and says: “if I hadn’t drawn I would have been no body. I don’t want to hear the sound of the sea the way it should be heard. Sometimes, I wish I had burnt my paintings. Present is the only thing that matters. Painter or dustman, so what?
I am having hard time understanding people. I enjoy God’s company! I talk from the inside and most of the people are not interested in that. I do embrace time and space in a single move. My talk is like the wind. I wonder why people talk or write about me; what I am is something else. I hate human relationships, openings. I love nonsense; I love God and the prophets.
Humanity is just like hunger or sleep, that’s all. Beggars or kings, it’s all the same, and that is the way they are in my paintings. Joy is not my topic. Pain, disabled and handicapped people; that is my world. Things change around me, I don’t. People talk without being connected to their spirit. May God demolish their houses!
For further information please contact Shari Cavin, Mariko Tanaka or Randall Morris at (212) 226 3768, by email: MTanaka@cavinmorris.com.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
| ||||||||||||||||||||
Cavin-Morris Gallery was last updated: 2009-01-05
Update general information with the Gallery Editor.
Update shows with the Exhibition Manager.
Update inventory with the Inventory Manager.
Update general information with the Gallery Editor.
Update shows with the Exhibition Manager.
Update inventory with the Inventory Manager.
|
© 2005-2008 chelseaartgalleries.com | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy
| Site Map |
