July 16-August 20, Artist Reception July 16, 4-6pm Tu, We, Fr, Sa 10:00-5:30pm, Th 11-7pm
Algerian painter Driss Ouadahi studied architecture before immigrating to Germany, where he continues to live and work. Utilizing a vocabulary of architectural motifs, Ouadahi makes large-scale paintings that borrow from the history of modernist grid painting and traditional Islamic aesthetics, while tackling the difficult and timely topic of human migration.
Ouadahi asks us to consider the political and psychological aspects of boundaries and the relationship they have to ethnicity and social class, through representations of three types of architectural imagery: cityscapes of glittering modernist high-rises, claustrophobic depictions of subway tunnels and photo-realistically rendered pictures of chain link fences.
Perhaps in response to his volunteer work-helping refugees from conflicts in the Middle East resettle in Germany-imagery of the cyclone fence dominates Ouadahi's most recent paintings. Fencing is a very real impediment to the movement of the millions of people currently fleeing war and violence or seeking a better life. It's used to shut them out, pen them in and divide "them" from "us." The fence is a dehumanizing symbol of "otherness"-a metaphor for alienation-as ugly a signifier as it is an object.
Driss Ouadahi was born in Morocco in 1959 to Algerian political exiles. He participated in the Cairo Biennial in 2010 and was included in The Future of a Promise: Contemporary Art from the Arab World during the 2011 Venice Biennale. He was awarded the grand prize at the Dakar Biennale in 2014. His work has been exhibited internationally, including in Dubai, New York, North Africa and throughout Europe. This is his fifth solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery.
Hosfelt Gallery will present new paintings by Ouadahi, largely renderings of chain-link fences, that were influenced by the artist's interactions with Syrian and Iraqi refugees who have re-settled in Germany. Ouadahi's depictions of the fence are meticulous.
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