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Robert Assaye
Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

Articles Available Online


Issy Wood, When You I Feel

Art Review

December 2017

Robert Assaye

Art Review

December 2017

At the centre of Issy Wood’s solo exhibition at Carlos/Ishikawa is a room-within-a room. The division of the gallery into two viewing spaces –...

Art

April 2017

'Learning from Athens'

Robert Assaye

Art

April 2017

The history of Documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition founded in the German city of Kassel in 1955, is...

For the last five decades, Simone Fattal has produced works that refract the particularities of the present vis-à-vis a careful consideration of the past ‘History is a continuous movement,’ the artist has said in a recent interview; one that ‘is made every day,’ as she notes in another[1] As aesthetic concerns in their own right, rather than mere source material, history and archaeology offer for Fattal modes of engaging form and politics with an indelible tenderness – a quality that defines the artist’s oeuvre   Born in Damascus in 1942, Simone Fattal was educated in Beirut and Paris, where she studied philosophy at the Sorbonne Upon returning to Beirut in 1969, she embarked on a career as a painter alongside contemporaries such as Etel Adnan, her collaborator and long-time partner with whom she still lives With Adnan, Fattal fled Lebanon in 1980, during the nation’s civil war, settling in northern California and founding the Post-Apollo Press, a publishing house for experimental literature Returning to visual art in 1988, Fattal began to make ceramic sculptures, and in the past decade has also made watercolours, paintings, and collage works   WORKS AND DAYS (2019), the first solo exhibition dedicated to Fattal in the United States, gathers several hundred of these works across various mediums in a smartly arranged retrospective that sheds light on the artist’s expansive interests in such topics as Sufi mysticism, mythology, and the geopolitics of the Arab world The artist draws from these themes to produce the ‘characters’ of her figurative ceramic sculptures, which include epic heroes such as Gilgamesh and Ulysses, alongside anonymous stock characters such as warriors, and standing or seated men and women Neatly grouped together on white plinths, these sculptures are rarely more than a meter high, and are displayed alongside Fattal’s abstract landscapes hung on the gallery’s walls, producing effective visual links between her practices As with her sculptural practice, Fattal’s approach to landscape is highly gestural, effacing the particulars of place while simultaneously indexing the artist’s hand While the title of the painting LE MONT SANNINE (1979) references the mountain that Fattal could

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

New Communities

Art

January 2017

Robert Assaye

Art

January 2017

DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network. Its forty million members contribute to a...
The Land Art of Julie Brook

Art

Issue No. 4

Robert Assaye

Art

Issue No. 4

Julie Brook works with the land. Over the past twenty years she has lived and worked in a succession of inhospitable locations, creating sculptures...

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Art

December 2016

Bonnie Camplin: Is it a Crime to Love a Prawn

Bonnie Camplin

Art

December 2016

  The title of Bonnie Camplin’s exhibition at 3236RLS Gallery, ‘Is it a Crime to Love a Prawn’, brings...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Abu One-Eye

Rav Grewal-Kök

Prize Entry

April 2017

He left two photographs.   In the first, his eldest brother balances him on a knee. It must be...

Interview

February 2014

Interview with Lisa Dwan

Rosie Clarke

Interview

February 2014

In a city where even the night sky is a dull, starless grey, immersion in absolute darkness is a...

 

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