Artist Farah Atassi exhibition – The Lost Hours is currently showing at the Almine Rech in London until November 9th 2024.
Born in 1981, Belgium artist Farah Atassi is known for revisiting some of the major themes of modern and contemporary painting in her pulsating compositions. These range from still life to the mechanical ballet and, more recently, the relationship between the model and the artist. Yet no model has ever posed for Atassi. Instead, she plays with the archetype of a model.
Created in Atassi’s mind out of an art historical vocabulary, the figures in her spellbinding works are all made up. Same for the artists’ studios and the other settings they inhabit. None of these spaces or objects belong to Atassi’s everyday life. Appropriating a vocabulary of geometric, pared-down modernist forms and references, her paintings are unshackled from any representational logic.
On closer inspection, it becomes evident that few models are actually at work. With their eyes shut or cast down, the figures are steeped in reading, sleeping on a divan or resting, curled up in an armchair. Acrobats have put down their hoops—their relaxed bodies are sagging. The languorous, soft spills create an impression of ease that differs from the way models are traditionally portrayed.
This is a time of their own. Figures are caught in the suspended, “lost hours” that give the exhibition its title and signal a departure. As she now invites the viewer to share these intimate moments, Farah Atassi’s works convey a sense of tranquillity and harmony.
You can visit this Exhibition until 9th of November at Almine Rech Gallery in London.
