EXHIBITIONS
Rosalind Nashashibi “Infinity Pool”
Dates: Oct 31 – Nov 25, 2023
Location: Taka Ishii Gallery (complex665)
Opening reception: Tuesday, Oct 31, 16:00 – 18:00
Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to present “Infinity Pool”, a solo exhibition by Rosalind Nashashibi from October 31 to November 25, 2023. From a female Punchinella to the prismatic ripples on the surface of a pool, Nashashibi’s new paintings address the borders between the inner and outer worlds, of the infinite and the finite.
The paintings in the show are not conceived as a series, rather the artist allows a theme of the painting to lead her into new territory, as such she is always pushing the image to the edge of acceptability. Here we find paintings that shimmer between the reflections on the surface of a swimming pool and the solidity and reassurance of a mattress. This shifting state between solid and liquid is reflected in her motifs of a female Punchinella, a body that is both female and male, as the mask suggests. The phallic sign points to the infinity becoming finite, the interior being expressed as the ultimate exteriority.
Granting herself permission to explore any motif that emerges, the paintings’ tension derives from the juxtapositions of the legible and the illegible, the abstract and the figurative, a fast and cursive gesture against a solid plane of colour, the frequent betrayal of any outline or edge followed by a heavily bordered form. In “Infinity Pool” the watery surfaces offer the simultaneity of the surface and the deep, which for Nashashibi is the preoccupation of painting.
She also presents works from the artist’s long-running series of Malvolio paintings started in 2019.
Rosalind Nashashibi (1973-) was born in Croydon, UK. She received her BA in Painting from Sheffield Hallam University in 1995, after which she attended the Glasgow School of Art, with an exchange programme to CalArts, receiving her MFA in 2000 from Glasgow School of Art. She became the first artist in residence at the National Gallery in London for the years 2019-21. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2017 and awarded Beck’s Futures prize in 2003. Nashashibi represented Scotland in the 52nd Venice Biennial. Her most recent solo exhibitions include “Hooks,” Nottingham Contemporary, UK (2023); “Monogram,” Musée Art Contemporain Carré d’Art, Nîmes and Radvila Palace Museum of Art, Vilnius (2022); “An Overflow of Passion and Sentiment,” National Gallery, London (2020); and “DEEP REDDER,” Secession, Vienna (2019). She has participated in such group exhibitions as “Unruly Kinships”, Temporary Gallery, Cologne (2023); “The Air, Like a Stone” at The Physics Room, Christchurch (2023); “Between Ears, New Colours”, CRAC, Alsace (2020); and “Cinéma du Réel festival”, Centre Pompidou and Forum des Images, Paris (2019), among others.
