Exhibition Guide A Lover’s Discourse is a new series of artist-led presentations at the Aspen Art Museum introducing unexpected dialogues between artworks from different generations.
ZEINAB SALEH
in the company of
KATHARINA FRITSCH
June 22–July 22, 2023
Aspen Art Museum
June 22, 2023–January 14, 2024 A Lover’s Discourse
Guglielmo Castelli Chase Hall Ulala Imai Stanislava Kovalcikova Zeinab Saleh Issy Wood
A Lover’s Discourse is a new series of artist-led presentations introducing unexpected dialogues between artworks from different generations. Each exhibition juxtaposes recent works by an early-career artist with their choice of a companion piece from a private collection in Aspen. Artist selections range from historical to contemporary pieces, and span figurative and abstract painting, sculpture, video, works on paper, and sound.
June 22–July 22, 2023
Zeinab Saleh in the company of Katharina Fritsch
The first presentation features two new paintings by London- based artist Zeinab Saleh (b. 1996, Kenya) exhibited alongside Regen [Rain] (1987) by Katharina Fritsch (b. 1956, Germany). Inviting focused contemplation, Saleh’s paintings combine charcoal, chalk, and acrylic into a soft palette where light and shade overlay and together give form to figurative subjects as well as more gestural abstract movements. They carry both the power and ephemerality of atmosphere. Shifts of perception and sensorial experience also pervade Fritsch’s Regen , which plays from a vinyl record in the gallery. The sound piece introduces a looped recording of the sound of falling raindrops that is at once both soothing and relentless. Together, the artworks build an environment in which gentleness and force revolve.
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List of works clockwise from entrance
Zeinab Saleh Midnight swim , 2022 Acrylic, charcoal, chalk, and acrylic fixative on canvas 59 1/8 x 67 in Courtesy the artist Zeinab Saleh Daylight leaves in good time , 2022 Acrylic, charcoal, chalk, and acrylic fixative on canvas 67 x 59 1/8 in Courtesy the artist
Zeinab Saleh (b. 1996, Kenya. Lives and works in London) received a Bachelor of Fine Art at Slade School of Fine Art, London. Recent solo exhibitions include J~o~y r~i~d~e , Champe Lacombe, Biarritz (2022); Softest place (on earth) [Extended mix] , Château Shatto, Los Angeles, and Softest place (on earth), Camden Art Centre, London (both 2021). Select group exhibitions include Nour El Ain , curated by Mohamed Almusibli, Karma International, Zurich; after image , curated by Robert Spragg, MAMOTH, London; The Poetics of the Neighbourhood Rascals , curated by Amal Alhaag, Barbershop Mixed People , Rotterdam; A patch of green in London , Cookhouse Gallery, London; Of New Babylon , curated by Sara Gulamali and Samboleap Tol, Lethaby Gallery, London; Friday Late: Snap with i-D , with Muslim Sisterhood, curated by Jenna Mason, V&A, London. Saleh was the recipient of a 2021
Katharina Fritsch Regen (Rain), 1987 12-inch vinyl record Private Collection
Metroland Cultures Grant, and has presented lectures at de Ateliers,
Amsterdam; UCL Art Museum, London; White Cube, London; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; University of Cambridge, Cambridge; and Tate Modern, London. Saleh is a co-founder of Muslim Sisterhood, an arts collective based in London. Select public collections include Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont; The Perimeter, London; and Start Museum, Shanghai.
A Lover’s Discourse
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June 22–July 22, 2023
Zeinab Saleh in the company of Katharina Fritsch
Apologia for Grey Negar Azimi
In elementary school, our French teacher was named Madame Bettina. Madame B, as we liked to call her, spoke French with a pronounced German accent. On most days she would begin by methodically erasing the chalk marks from the previous class, her clunky bracelets jingling as she moved. Because she was not appreciably taller than her students, Madame B was unable to reach the top of the chalkboard, and somehow, the torrent of marks she left behind, elliptical patterns made of letters and numbers, seemed more vivid in my imagination than anything she endeavored to teach us. Much later, I learned that the mysterious marks framing our French grammar lessons were algebra equations. That chalkboard, a delirious palimpsest, became inextricably tied to my experience of language. A series of hieroglyphs to be deciphered.
I am taken by the deployment of grey in Zeinab Saleh’s paintings. Grey, Zeinab tells me, is traditionally a preparatory color. It is the color of the chalk or charcoal that one might use for a sketch. It is, in other words, not “the real thing.” Not the climax, but rather, the preamble. Provisional. Powdered charcoal, as it happens, a material she is prone to using, is messy and unstable. It smudges and leaks and runs. It is vulnerable, capricious, ephemeral. Slippery. Much like memory.
I return to grey as a metaphor.
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In producing her tenebrous paintings, Zeinab methodically makes marks with charcoal, chalk, and acrylic—then removes them over time using a dry brush. A laborious process, a perennial tinkering, push and pull. Zeinab’s subtractions are additive. “Making,” now intimately linked to “unmaking,” is turned on its head. The process may take as long as months. She stops only when she’s happy with the tones. Incidentally, “tone,” which has a musical connotation, is her word. I begin to think of her as a conductor, fine tuning, orchestrating her painterly creations.
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What color is memory?
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Dear Grey, you get such a bad rap: drab, depressed, nondescript. A “grey” woman is fading away, as though all life has been squeezed out of her. She is a woman who spends too much time and money on hair color. Or, as it happens, who chooses not to. Grey is lifeless, lusterless, neutral. Grey, says Google, is “stability and boredom.”
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A panoply of ghostly traces is how one might describe what materializes on the canvas. Which is to say, a la Madame B.
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Hieroglyphs to be deciphered .
I would like to declare my love for grey, its quality of being neither black nor white, but rather, indeterminate, forever in-between. Grey, I believe, is an intellectual position, a defense of uncertainty, ambivalence. In its refusal to submit, it is dynamic, irreverent, heroic.
Other words come to mind as I gaze at her idiosyncratic marks: silhouette, shadow, moonlight, outline.
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The outline of a monstera plant, full of curves and canyons and drawn from the artist’s studio,
appears in Daylight leaves in good time . So does a dragonfly she once spied. A nocturnal swim in Biarritz with friends inspires a spray of waves in Midnight swim . In this way, Zeinab’s primary source material is memory itself. But more crucially, its gaps and crevices, its instability and promiscuousness, its … grey. “I see a leg,” she says, while gazing at a painting. “I see an open mouth,” I say, looking at the same painting.
“I enjoy foggy days,” says Zeinab. Which sounds about right, since she lives in London. She tells me that a hazy day makes her more attentive, inspires a more active viewing of her surroundings. “You look more closely,” she assures me. Grey, she suggests, doesn’t occlude or obscure. It enlightens; it is revelatory. A little like standing under the moon(light).
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Both, of course, are equally true.
I begin to think of Zeinab’s dense, enigma-filled surfaces as emotion-scapes, collisions of time and place, fragments of stories—real and imagined. Alternative landscapes, if you will, capacious and irreverent, the product of a sort of stripping down. An excavation of the psyche.
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“We look at the world once, in childhood,” says the poet Louise Glück. “The rest is memory.”
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Water is a recurring trope in these works. Both translucent and opaque, placid and tempestuous. Always subject to moods. Transporting.
“The color of truth is grey,” said André Gide, and I find myself agreeing.
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Negar Azimi is a writer based in New York. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the publishing and curatorial project Bidoun .
Aspen Art Museum
ABOUT THE ASPEN ART MUSEUM
Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in 1979, the Aspen Art Museum is a thriving and globally engaged non-collecting contemporary art museum. Following the 2014 opening of the museum’s facility designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Shigeru Ban, the AAM enjoys increased attendance, renewed civic interaction, and international media attention. In July 2017, the AAM was one of ten institutions to receive the United States’ National Medal for Museum and Library Services for its educational outreach to rural communities in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley and its fostering of learning partnerships with civic and cultural partners within a 100-mile radius of the museum’s Aspen location.
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aspenartmuseum.org (970) 925-8050
Hours Tuesday–Sunday, 10 AM–6 PM Closed Mondays
Admission to the AAM is free courtesy of Amy and John Phelan.
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A Lover’s Discourse is curated by AAM Curator at Large Stella Bottai. AAM exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund. General exhibition support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Visiting Artist Fund. Additional support is provided by the AAM National Council.
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