Lawrie Shabibi is pleased to announce its participation in Art Dubai Modern, the first dedicated section to 20th century art by artists from the Middle East and South Asia to be held at Art Dubai. We will be presenting a solo booth of early work on canvas and on paper by the renowned Lebanese artist Nabil Nahas. The focus of this group will be four major paintings from 1977-1979, a period when Nahas was engaged with geometric abstraction. These works formed the basis of Nahas' first two solo shows in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the last three decades they have been shown together only once, at his 2010 retrospective, the inaugural show at the Beirut Exhibition Center.
The paintings in this group demonstrate Nahas' early interest in Islamic art and the parallels he drew between these tessellated ever expanding patterns and the three dimensional repetition of the same volumetric forms one could find for example in stress structures, thus fusing different geometric systems together and slowing considerably the reading of the paintings. These complex geometries, poised between order and chaos, anticipate his much later fractal paintings for which he is perhaps best-known.
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