ZONA MACO Arte Contemporáneo
New Proposals curated by José Esparza Chong Cuy
February 5-9, 2020
Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of ten new works on paper by artist Nour El Saleh, titled The Play That Goes On Forever, in the New Proposals section of Zona Maco 2020 curated by José Esparza Chong Cuy.
Influenced by Lillian Craton’s book The Victorian Freak Show, regarding the contextual weight physical states have on perception, and an interest in physiognomy and its manipulation, Nour El Saleh creates fantastical images informed by her upbringing and cultural experiences. El Saleh’s dream-like works explore notions of place, belonging and selective/relative memory. Working instinctively without creating studies, figures with exaggerated features appear out of the bodies of larger figures replicating and morphing on the canvas—interacting with the denizens of the artist’s selective conscious. By utilizing theatrical references, masks and costumes, the characters in her stories, often self-referential in nature, probe conceptions of cultural identity and place.
El Saleh was born in Lebanon in 1997, where she feels a sense of social amnesia acts as a behavioral default due to its history, and raised in the United Arab Emirates, a host for impermanent residents. She graduated from the UCL Slade School of Fine Art (London, UK) in the spring of 2019, and currently divides her time between London and Beirut. Nour El Saleh will be presenting her first solo exhibition with Lowell Ryan Projects this June, 2020.
