A SEASON IN HELL
2015-11-16Our imagination is not powered out of a void. It is driven by inputs and sources that surround us: vivid memories and experiences, fears and desires, films we’ve seen, books we’ve read, and stories we’ve been told. A Season in Hell brings together eight artists that have made a creative leap to reconfigure the logic of reality in their work. They twist, distort and amplify sources and subjects alike. They play with the conventions of dreams and hallucinations, as a fluid and elusive state that in its absurdity is sometimes closer to the truth.
The exhibition assembles a collection of old and recent work made out of canvas, celluloid, wood, paper, linen and plastic. Some artists have taken their queues from the explosion of mass media and online images to explore the gulf between what we see and what we comprehend. Basim Magdy’s work resembles a dramatic still from a fantasy animation, heavy with allusions to a shadowy industrial civilization. Ahmad Sabry explores the tension between image and text and the loss of meaning in a series of needlepoint on linen works. With a hyper-saturated palette, Hany Rashed presents psychological scenes from the streets of Cairo, while Marwa El Shazly mines her archive of personal nightmares. Conversely, Ranya Fouad’s dreamy works play on tranquility, stillness and subtle change.
Another group of work branches out of a figurative tradition. Doa Aly explores the fine line between resistance and flow through a series of pencil on paper drawings that make use of bone illustrations from Gray’s Anatomy. Amr Kafrawy’s triptych contrasts spectral figures against a shaky cityscape and Nada Baraka’s paintings are tumultuous and explosive, sinuously moving from organic to industrial, from deliberate to spontaneous.
The show pays homage to the spirit of Arthur Rimbaud and borrows its title from his influential poem A Season in Hell published in 1873.
Opposite – Nada Baraka, Untitled, 2015
Exhibition runs through to January 20th, 2016
Gypsum Gallery
5 Ibrahim Naguib Street, Apt 2
Garden City
Cairo
Egypt
