DORA JERIDI: HUMANITY

Perrotin New York is pleased to present Humanity, an exhibition of new paintings by Dora Jeridi, marking her first solo exhibition with the gallery.

January 11 - February 19, 2025

Jeridi’s figures are simultaneously universal and deeply personal. In this new body of work, the artist captures an ambiguity between vulnerability and strength, between a febrile state and the expression of power, inviting us to consider what makes our humanity. Without providing answers, Jeridi encourages us to dwell in uncertainty, to explore the spaces where meaning remains both elusive and profound.

Dora Jeridi finds words troubling. Reflective less of ineptitude than of the frustrations with language, she is a painter who is suspicious of how words can be used to pin down and harden meaning. Paintings may not utter words, but they, too, can speak; like dreams, they can break into parts and contradict the will of the painter and of its own objecthood. In this exhibition, titled Humanity, fragmented bodies and distorted limbs emerge from a sea of expressive brushwork, the detailed renderings contrasting with the bold emergency of Jeridi’s gestures.

Jeridi knows that the calcification of language can lead to the calcification of relations, and as such she chooses to relinquish control, letting her visual speech pour out in ways that get lost in detail and digression. Jeridi references the music of Coltrane, jazz, and improvisation to describe her artistic process—errancy, contradiction, and the fluid logic of intuition and uncertainty dominate over the rationale of sequencing and plotting.

. The work stands back, puns, circles, and fizzles, while taking on a life of its own. Jeridi dreams of creating new grammatical structures, a new alphabet, committed to the pleasures and freedoms of misunderstandings, and translation and distortion in service not of truth, but rather of desire and possibility.