Shulamit Nazarian

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to announce Breaks and Suspensions, an exhibition by Israeli-born, New York- based artist Naama Tsabar. This exhibition marks the artist’s second solo show with the gallery, on view from February 15 through March 25, 2023. The exhibition title, Breaks and Suspensions, references colloquial terms for two of the artist’s ongoing series: Melody of Certain Damage and Gaffer. This exhibition marks the first time that these two series are exclusively shown together, making clear the conceptual and utilitarian connections shared by each body of work. Tsabar’s practice fuses elements from sculpture, music, performance and architecture. Collaborating with local communities of female identifying and gender non-conforming performers, Tsabar writes a new feminist and queer history of mastery. Her interactive works expose hidden spaces and systems, reconceive gendered narratives, and shift the passive viewing experience to one of active participation. The artist draws attention to the muted and unseen by propagating sound through space and sculptural form. Resting someplace between sculpture and instrument, form and sound, Tsabar’s work lingers on the intimate, sensual, and corporeal potentials within these transitional states. Tsabar’s Melody of Certain Damage series subverts the hypermasculine, destructive and cathartic action of smashing a guitar on stage by re-thinking the broken pieces back into a functioning object, bringing the sculptural into the realm of the aural and tactile. Beginning alone in her studio, Tsabar breaks the guitar against her floor. After impact and break, she maps the exact location of each scattered piece and then reconstructs the instrument so that it can once again emit sound. The resulting form of each work from this series operates as an artifact of the studio-based action, while allowing the new instrument to shift into the realm of sonic sculpture. Tsabar’s use of ready-made objects and the significant role of chance in Melody of Certain Damage introduces a dialogue with Dada practices of the early-twentieth century—a canonic period of art history now scrutinized for its preferential treatment toward male artists and its exclusion of their female contemporaries. Her works in this series are exhibited on low lying plinths on the gallery floor, just as one might find them scattered on a stage or in the artist’s studio. Rather than positioning the viewer solely as spectator, Tsabar opens the possibility to activate the artwork through touch. Viewers and performers can rest their bodies on the floor, beside the object, allowing their touch to elicit an emotional and sensual experience, as well as a sonic expression. In her newest works from the ongoing Gaffer series, instrument cables travel through fields made from layering numerous strips of tape, the same material used to mask and stabilize cables in performance spaces. The monochromatic field of tape holds the cables suspended in different visual compositions as they flow in and out of the rectangular frame. In these works, Tsabar continues her interest in gaffer tape as a hidden utilitarian material within a performative order—a material she first used in her works Twilight (Gaffer Wall), 2006 and Encore, 2007. This series, which both critiques and pays homage to the aesthetics of Minimalism, moves the tape from the unseen location of the stage floor to its scrutable position on the gallery wall. Tsabar specifically calls attention to the hidden labor associated with the material through the meticulous layering of the tape, creating a significant thickness and a subtle textural rhythm of lines on its surface. She further calls attention to the labor involved in their creation by naming the people who contributed to the act of “gaffering” in the credit lines of the work. These artworks refuse to be confined to a single category, borrowing from elements of painting, drawing, and sculpture. They hinge the functional and the visual; while the cable running through the work can be read as a gestural mark, and the tape itself a color field, the works never lose their potential to actively transmit sound. Within the exhibition, works from each series are not only united by their concept, at times they also become physically linked. Audio cables transmit sound from the broken guitars in Melody of Certain Damage, move through the physical plane of the Gaffer works, and ultimately connect to a live amplifier that emits sound throughout the gallery. With this gesture, Tsabar activates each artwork and the gallery itself, turning the viewer, artwork, and architecture into active collaborators. Throughout these works, Tsabar’s invocation of Dada and Minimalist processes and aesthetics is not only an act of feminist reclamation, it also highlights the influences within liberatory movements: Dada's anti-war anarchic absurdism, Minimalism's socialist use of industrial objects to create material accessibility, and both movements’ rejection of institutional spaces. Citing these approaches within her work, Tsabar’s practice goes beyond revising art history to diversify the canon. It harnesses these elements as part of a modus operandi that is feminist and a practice that positions individual viewers and local communities as direct participants.

Opening Reception Friday February 17th, 5-8pm Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present A War on Wars, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Amir H. Fallah. This will be the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from February 15 through March 25, 2023. The exhibition title, A War on Wars, suggests an active resistance to conflict, one that is centered on awareness, education, and protest. Fallah was born in Iran and lived in the country during the Iran-Iraq war. This exhibition draws from early childhood memories of wartime, combined with a consideration of contemporary global conflicts. Synthesized through painting and sculpture, the artist combines a range of imagery to invoke parables that address an ever-shifting geo-political landscape and structure of power The exhibition combines two distinct and ongoing series for the artist, Veiled Portraits and Grid Paintings, alongside a new series of life-sized figurative sculptures. The artist’s Veiled Portraits deconstruct traditional notions of identity formation, while simultaneously defying expectations of the genre of portraiture by obscuring the appearance of his subject. In these works, the absence of the sitter’s physical likeness is substituted with a wider representation of their personhood—one that is articulated through a network of symbols and imagery. The Grid Paintings employ seemingly disparate images and symbols that amalgamate personal narratives with historical and contemporary parables. The paintings serve as a diary of lessons, warnings, and ideals providing coded insight into cultural values often passed between generations. In the painting We See This Fight as Worship, for example, Fallah stages a central figure holding two ceremonial scepters—one orbed, the other bearing a head with horns—crossed against their chest, flanked by two mirrored figures kneeling with their palms pressed together. Any sign of the three figures’ gender or race is obscured by mod patterned fabrics. Drawn from mid-century design, these covers reference a period when Western nations consolidated power domestically, while engaging in tactical destabilization throughout the Global South. Ornate borders, like those of Persian manuscript paintings, disrupt the hierarchic organization of the figures, zig-zagging to a Miniature style equestrian figure engaged in battle with a dragon in the upper register and trumpeting angels in the Art Deco style characteristic of Erté in the lower register. On opposing sides of these vignettes, the bold letters of “we see this fight as worship” are sublimated into decorative floral patterning customary of Persian rugs. While angels and dragon slaying present clear-cut metaphors for good and evil, the remainder of the imagery complicates matters. The title “we see this fight as worship” quotes from one of Khomeini’s speeches during the Iranian revolution—a rebellion which sought to unseat the government formed following the 1953 coup orchestrated by the US and UK. While the revolution liberated the country from direct Western influence, it also established an authoritarian theocracy, ushering Iranian people from one oppressive external influence to another even more restrictive administration. Bringing together these loaded symbols, Fallah maps the suspect dynamics of power, cautioning us to be weary when placing faith. Fallah combines elements from both the Veiled Portraits and Grid Paintings for a new series of sculptures. Hand painted on cut aluminum, the sculptures similarly exclude signifiers of ethnicity, age, gender, and class. Here, however, the sitter stands composed in the anatomically neutral position characteristic of medical treatises and their form is flattened to a narrow plane. The ornate cultural patterns that appear elsewhere in the artist’s works—draped over sitters in the Veiled Portraits and obscuring the text in the Grids—cover the entirety of the sculpture, while the range of symbolic objects are literally cut from within the body, only discernible from the outlines they make in both the positive and negative spaces of the work. Together, these works address the way identity and culture are staged and presented to secure systems of power and oppression. A War on Wars will be presented concurrently with a solo exhibition at the Fowler Museum at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Titled The Fallacy of Borders, the exhibition features twenty-five works spanning painting, sculpture, and stained glass. This exhibition marks Fallah's first solo museum exhibition in his adoptive home city of Los Angeles, while returning the artist’s work to UCLA, where he received his Master of Fine Arts in 2005. Both the Fowler Museum and the gallery’s exhibitions also coincide with Fallah’s public project CHANT in support of human rights in Iran. The debut presentation of a large-scale neon artwork will be displayed on the gallery’s facade on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood concurrent with his solo exhibition. A radiant sun—in reference to ancient Persian traditions and a contemporary symbol of dissent—bears the face of a woman. While Persian rulers have added and removed the sun’s gender to validate their own power and authority throughout history, Fallah reclaims the symbolic female sun to foreground women’s rights, elevating the power of people rather than any one ruler. Interchangeably displaying "WOMAN. LIFE. FREEDOM" in Farsi, English, and the phonetic Farsi, CHANT operates as a beacon of light carrying the rallying cry of the ongoing liberation movement in Iran. On CHANT, Fallah shares, “First and foremost, this project is a tool for public education, joining the demand for urgent change in Iran, using the power of art to elevate the dialogue, spark press coverage, and keep it in the public eye. The sun in the center carries great symbolic weight for the future of the Iranian people, an ancient symbol representing change, hope, and positive growth. CHANT is a visual statement that will help serve as a beacon for all those united in the struggle for freedom.” The three presentations, A War on Wars, The Fallacy of Borders, and CHANT, collectively provide an expansive understanding of the artist's prolific oeuvre over the past decade, while also demonstrating new directions in public sculpture, each addressing a nuanced and emotive inquiry about identity, the immigrant experience, and the history of portraiture.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to announce Seeds, a two-person exhibition featuring the works of Los Angeles artists Fay Ray and Daniel Gibson, on view from April 8 through May 13. Joining Ray’s suspended aluminum sculptures with Gibson’s mixed-media charcoal works on paper, Seeds unites two gallery artists for their congruous approaches to the desert landscapes of Southern California. Harvesting desert imagery for alternative methods to represent the body, these artists reference the natural world to address socio-cultural experiences, unearthing a liberated state of being that exists within all. Fay Ray explores the fetishization of objects and the construction of female identity through high-contrast, monochrome photomontages and metallic sculpture. For her three-dimensional works, Fay Ray compiles cast aluminum objects, bored volcanic rocks, wire, chain, and natural materials into suspended sculptural masses. Conflating worlds of worship and desire, the works across mediums borrow from the symbolism and composition of traditional religious relics and the visual language of the occult. Ray’s sculptures and collages hint at the presence of a rematerialized body through a mysterious yet systematic organization of abstract form. Employing references to the natural world while speaking to hardships, resilience, and freedom, Daniel Gibson's paintings explore a lexicon of symbols that relate to his familial past and his identity as a Mexican-American. Growing up along the California border with Mexico, Gibson witnessed the harsh realities of migration to America at an early age. In an effort to face the bleak nature of these grueling journeys, he turned to his imagination—often reshaping reality with fantasy. As a painter, Gibson brings to life the surreal narratives that captivated him as a child, presenting memories and family stories from the point of view of his earliest years anew. Gibson is largely a self-taught artist and has developed his visual language and painting process through intuition and imagination. Shifting between the genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life, Gibson's surrealistic scenes demonstrate an adoration for nature. Desert landscapes are populated with generously painted lush flowers that often take on an anthropomorphized quality. The ocean is prominently featured in many of his family stories and creates a stark contrast with the arid desert landscape of his childhood. Gibson revitalizes the world around him in painting, reverently returning to familiar symbols such as flowers, butterflies, figures, desert mountains, beaches, and seas. For the artist, his works are as much autobiographical as they are collective stories that document moments of struggle and celebration that would otherwise be lost to time.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to announce Rabid Heart, an exhibition by New York-based artist Coady Brown. This exhibition marks the artist’s second solo show with the gallery, on view from April 8 through May 13, 2023. Coady Brown’s paintings are grounded in a careful awareness of the politics inherent to depicting feminine and androgynous figures. Committed to methods of representation that shield figures from the binds of voyeurism and over-determination, the paintings presented in Rabid Heart hone the artist’s long-standing commitment to depicting wholly autonomous figures, cultivating and preserving an interior psychology impermeable to the viewer and artist alike. Rabid Heart celebrates the uninhibited passion, verve, and power these figures retain, regardless of those watching. Brown’s paintings examine how groups, couples, and solitary figures navigate self-presentation in private and public life. Often situated within the drama and darkness of nightlife, Brown’s paintings explore the nuances of moving through the world in a feminized body. Figures are often compressed into tightly framed, intimate spaces that expose the subtle complexities of our interpersonal connections and relationships. Drawing from varied source material—including canonical portraiture, art history, fashion, film, and everyday experiences—Brown orchestrates psychologically charged environments that pulse with a sense of mystery and wonder. Through attention to lighting, vibrant clothing, and high-contrast colors, Brown’s figures’ inscrutable expressions hint at an unknowable and autonomous selfhood, conjuring a precise instant within a specific and stylized world.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Sensory Homunculus, an exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Bridget Mullen. This will be the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from January 7 through February 10, 2023. Known for paintings that combine decisive mark-making with experimentation, Mullen’s intuitive practice conjures psychedelic compositions that oscillate between abstraction and figuration. For Sensory Homunculus, the artist introduces a dialogue on the “problem” of painting, the evergreen discourse on the role of interpretation in art, inviting writer Lara Mimosa Montes as her respondent. Addressing the statement to her peer, Mullen’s dialogue serves as an invitation to consider painting’s ambivalent potential—those distances between painting and artist, observer, body, world—as the space for reflection.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Contours of the Vast, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Annie Lapin. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from November 12 through December 17. Known for paintings that merge the art-historical genres of landscape, figuration, and abstraction, Lapin compresses geological space and time within a single picture plane to explore how both our bodies and minds shape the way we perceive the world. Initiating each painting with generous pours of paint and liquid graphite, Lapin’s abstract marks become the armature around which pictorial space is built. With figures often subsumed by the surrounding environment, vignettes from history collapse against flashes of the everyday, just as our memories and experiences continually come together to define culture. Although the body dematerializes in these imaginaries, Lapin poses this porousness as a relieving liberation. “There is a comfort in overcoming the vulnerability of our boundaries,” she shares. Contours of the Vast restages the cognitive processes we use to write history and define humanity, inviting us to reflect on the stories we tell every day.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Good Grief, Bad Grief, a solo exhibition by the Houston-based artist Trenton Doyle Hancock. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Exploring a mythology that spans over twenty-five years, Hancock has created a cast of characters, a lexicon of symbols, and an evolving, non-linear narrative of epic proportion. Storytelling is at the root of the artist’s practice, drawing equally from the world of comics, film, art history, and religion. Employing his classic rough-and-tumble aesthetic, Hancock’s works often include richly textured surfaces composed through collage, drawing, painting, and found objects, such as bottle caps. Good Grief, Bad Grief builds on Hancock’s ever-expanding iconography, uniting several individual bodies of work and known characters—such as his alter ego Torpedo Boy and his classic Vegan antagonists. Developed from the artist’s celebrated Step and Screw series, these new works depict Hancock wrestling with ideas of self, the meaning of his own artwork, and prevalent systems of power and oppression in America. These works speak defiantly to many of our nation’s deepest and darkest histories, shining a light on good and evil, and the gray in between.

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Senescent Stone, a new series of free-standing and wall-based ceramics by Los Angeles-based artist Charles Snowden. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Using symbolic imagery from antiquity and everyday life, Snowden’s ceramic sculptures reflect on the cycles of life and death. Invoking ancient rituals, he recasts apotropaic objects—protective forms intended to ward off threats of evil or harm—with imagery from nature. Senescence refers to the process of deterioration with age, indicating the loss of a cell’s power for division or growth. With the garden as a site for the investigation of mortality and clay as a material synonymous with the body, Senescent Stone reinterprets historical imagery as a vehicle for understanding the temporal nature of our existence. The exhibition weaves together references to domestic spaces and gardens—including architecture, the body, plants, and a variety of imagined creatures—with specific rituals. With symbols of metamorphosis, growth, deterioration, and decay throughout, the artist presents existential imagery with mystery and humor. Snowden shares, “I imagine possibilities within the relationships between the human, non-human and by extension non-living world to cultivate experiences that feel regenerative and playful, yet melancholic.”

Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles is pleased to present 10 YEARS, a special group exhibition celebrating this milestone anniversary for the gallery. To mark the anniversary, founder Shula Nazarian and co-owner Seth Curcio have selected works by more than twenty artists from the gallery’s program. The exhibition will be on view from July 9 – August 27, 2022. A day-long opening, with many of the artists in attendance, will take place on Saturday, July 9th from 2 – 6pm. Shula Nazarian says, “10 YEARS, proudly unites the artwork of each gallery artist within the context of a single exhibition. While we look back and consider the accomplishments of both the gallery and our artists over this past decade, we also look to our future with the addition of several artists that are new to the gallery, placing the next generation of artists in dialogue with those that have long been pillars to the creative development of our shared space. This inclusive presentation underscores the gallery’s belief that artists have the unique ability to help us understand the most pressing issues of our day and to illuminate new pathways for tomorrow.”