Sabah Naim: Solo Exhibition at Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, Egypt

now until May 20, 2009 // Townhouse Gallery / Factory Space // Cairo, Egypt

This is Sabah Naim’s third solo exhibition at Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art which will be her largest show in Egypt in several years. Her artwork is currently on displayed in both the first-floor gallery and the factory space now through May 20, 2009. The artist will present recent work produced in London and Cairo, including a short video. Naim photographs people as they move through public space: walking down the street, relaxing in the park, sitting on the metro.

Visitors at a museum are captured as they take break on benches—paused spectators turned spectacle. As in her earlier work, Naim enlarges her snapshots, xeroxing or printing them on canvas, and then paints and draws over the black-and-white images. Playing with figure and ground, she alternately highlights or obscures the protagonists in her portraits. The intervention of her hand does not individuate but instead adds another layer of noise in the city, another mask for these faces in the crowd.

In this particular exhibition, Naim introduces embroidery to her work, pushing her images into three dimensions. She combines photography with handpainted motifs, covering young men in sloganed t-shirts with stitched appliqués, Naim questions binaries such as contemporary and traditional, the masculine and the feminine, fine art and craft.

Sabah Naim lives and works in Cairo, where she is a professor at the College of Art Education. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at B21 Gallery in Dubai and Galleria Lia Rumma in Naples as well as the traveling group shows “Africa Remix” and “Word into Art.”

For more information please visit the Townhouse Gallery web site and support this artist.

www.thetownhousegallery.com