FARAH ATASSI: THE LOST HOURS

Almine Rech London is pleased to present "The Lost Hours", Farah Atassi's solo exhibition.

October 7 – November 9, 2024

Farah Atassi is known for revisiting some of the major themes of modern and contemporary painting in her pulsating compositions. These range from still life to the mechanical ballet and, more recently, the relationship between the model and the artist. Yet no model has ever posed for Atassi. Instead, she plays with the archetype of a model.

Created in Atassi’s mind out of an art historical vocabulary, the figures in her spellbinding works are all made up. Same for the artists’ studios and the other settings they inhabit. None of these spaces or objects belong to Atassi’s everyday life. Appropriating a vocabulary of geometric, pared-down modernist forms and references, her paintings are unshackled from any representational logic.

Farah Atassi’s technique too contributes to this meditation on painting. Made of oil and glycerol paints, the texture of the canvases is deliberately left rugged and imperfect. Suggestive of changes that may have happened during the production process, when seen from up close, the uneven thickness of the paint invites the viewer to wander along works. This physical quality further underlines their orchestrated artifice.

Painting is a window onto reality, is the common saying since the Renaissance. Painting is a window onto painting, says the work of Farah Atassi.