Frieze New York 2026
Overview
Nada Elkalaawy, 'What Survives will Eventually Sing', 2025, Oil on canvas, 152 x 112 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Lawrie Shabibi.
Booth D11
Lawrie Shabibi and P420 announce their joint participation in Frieze New York 2026, presenting a focused collaborative presentation in a shared booth. The presentation brings together artists working across diverse cultural contexts and artistic disciplines, including Nabil Nahas (b. 1949, Lebanese), Hamra Abbas (b. 1976, Pakistani), Nada Elkalaawy (b. 1993, Egypt), Francis Offman (b. 1987, Rwandan) and Adelaide Cioni (b. 1976, Italian). Working across marble, textile, painting, and material-based practices, these artists offer distinct yet interconnected approaches to surface, structure, and material memory.
The presentation includes several works spanning textile, painting, sculptural installation, and industrial material processes. Two works on canvas incorporating found materials and coffee grounds by Francis Offman are shown alongside a textile composition by Adelaide Cioni, in which wool is stitched directly onto canvas. These are presented in dialogue with marble inlay works by Hamra Abbas and textural paintings by Nabil Nahas, alongside figurative compositions by Nada Elkalaawy that engage with layered surfaces and the fragmentation of memory. The restrained, minimalist booth design emphasises the relationships between the works, highlighting both contrast and continuity across practices.
The presentation considers expanded interpretations of painting through material transformation across Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Offman’s works combine textiles and found materials to reflect on postcolonial histories and fragmented memory. Cioni’s stitched wool compositions explore decorative pattern, gesture, and the language of textile as image. Abbas’s marble inlay works draw from both Mughal ornamentation and the traditions of Renaissance painting, while Nahas’s practice transforms paint into highly textured, dimensional surfaces that suggest natural and cosmic systems. Elkalaawy’s paintings, in parallel, extend these concerns through an exploration of image-making as a process of accumulation and erasure, where multiple temporalities and sources converge to produce nuanced, often ambiguous representations of memory.
Nabil Nahas continues his exploration of the relationship between nature and abstraction through richly textured paintings that merge organic form with geometric structure. A Lebanese-American artist based between New York and Beirut, Nahas has lived and worked in New York for over five decades, where his primary studio remains. His works demonstrate a deep engagement with pattern, repetition, and surface, often referencing marine life, fractal systems, and the underlying order of the natural world. Engaging with histories of colour, geometry, and abstraction, Nahas extends these legacies through a painterly language that is both tactile and immersive. He will also represent Lebanon at the 61st Venice Biennale with an installation titled Don’t Get Me Wrong, on view from May 9 to November 22, 2026. The project explores the relationship between man, nature, and the cosmos, offering a visual and spiritual experience that transforms the spectacular into a vehicle for introspection.
Hamra Abbas has, over several years, developed an ongoing engagement with marble inlay (pietra dura), a decorative technique that involves the precise cutting and assembling of coloured stones to produce intricate pictorial compositions. Repositioning this historically ornamental practice within a contemporary artistic framework, Abbas extends its visual and conceptual possibilities beyond its traditional architectural function. Her works draw from Mughal architectural traditions and their use of garden imagery, where idealised landscapes operate as metaphors for paradise, harmony, and the cyclical relationship between life and mortality. Through this lens, Abbas examines the symbolic role of nature within architectural language, exploring how colour, pattern, and material surface contribute to constructed visions of the natural world.
Additionally, Abbas’ Tree Studies series, originally commissioned for the Louvre Abu Dhabi as part of the Richard Mille Art Prize exhibition Art Here 2025, reflects her ongoing engagement with material and craft. Working with lapis and marble techniques rooted in South Asian traditions, she reimagines botanical drawings of olive, pomegranate, and cherry trees into quiet, meditative forms.
Nada Elkalaawy’s practice explores the threshold at which images shift from truth into fiction, engaging figurative painting as a site for the construction and erosion of memory. Working from an archive of collected imagery rather than direct observation, she develops compositions that interweave family photographs, still lifes, art-historical references, and digital sources. Through processes of layering, mirroring, and doubling, her paintings foreground subtle transformations of presence and absence, where surfaces operate as accumulative fields of gesture and trace. Motifs of flowers, plants, and domestic objects recur as carriers of emotional and symbolic weight, functioning as vessels for narratives of mourning, regeneration, and attachment. By bringing together multiple temporalities and spatial registers, Elkalaawy produces compositions that are at once intimate and unstable, inviting a sustained engagement with the ambiguities of recollection and representation.
Together, these artists present a reflection on how material, surface, and process continue to expand the language of painting today, revealing dialogues that move across geographies, histories, and artistic traditions.
