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Édouard Montassut is pleased to announce his new exhibition featuring Kaoru Arima, Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi and Özgür Kar.
Kaoru Arima’s portraits reflect the artist’s concern into the formal possibilities of the painting object with a structure determined by play with color and painterly touch, drawn upon a strength of in-betweeness and abstraction. Depicting a fragmented everydayness, the paintings are informed by the artist’s diaristic practice of experiment drawings though others senses, especially the haptic one, such as looking at bones by touching one’s own body or looking at the texture of one’s respiratory organs through breathing.
By investigating normalised notions of aesthetics, craft and folklore, shared knowledge and self-sustained economies, Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi addresses classist implications of taste and politics of aesthetics, questioning existing power-structures, her surroundings, and the narratives present in contemporary art. In her recent work, fire punctures mirror foil, revealing layers of mass-produced materials such as rhinestone and gold chains, creating a formalist abstract collage. Placed on the floor, the collages obtain a sculptural quality and become an architectural element reflecting the surrounding.
Özgür Kar’s recent black-and-white video animations sketch out anthropomorphic creatures, and a reoccurring male figure squeezed into the confined frame of giant flat screens. Coupled with black comedy and gallows humour, Kar’s minimalist black-and-white characters whisper monologues of tragedy, homoeroticism, nonsense, and pulp. His characters are caught in portrait-format nearly motionless in their claustrophobic cache. Stencilled out as white lines on black backgrounds, the simple, stop-motion-like avatars are drenched in darkness, both emotional and factual.