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Six Landscapes

Daniele Genadry & Matt Saunders

November 7th, 2023 - April 14th 2024

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The Institute of Arab and Islamic Art is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition of works by Daniele Genadry and Matt Saunders. Featuring six paintings, in addition to a selection of drawings and prints, this exhibition explores the artist's sustained engagements with photography and film and how these mediums are employed as a way to further evolve the field of painting. Both Genadry and Saunders begin by using images of landscapes that have been generated by camera, and through a detailed meditative process of painting, the works come to life inside a new framework, thus granting them the possibility to conjure their own histories. The pairing of their luminous paintings provides the viewer with a deeper insight into the various methods in which both artists experiment with light as a way to define their respective worlds, ones that ebb and flow between notions of presence, disappearance and fragility. 

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Painting alternately from photography and memory, Daniele Genadry’s work explores the entanglement between the experience of being (seeing) in the present while being aware of its ephemerality. The images she paints attempt to capture this paradoxical perspective by allowing the work to generate its own temporality whereby a fleeting image or quality (of light) can persist in time and become visible. Her paintings require the viewer to adjust their way of looking and experience of time in order for the images to begin revealing themselves and fully appear.

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Painting predominately from film, Matt Saunders' work articulates the various ways in which images are placed in history, and how, in turn, they take on new meanings by reassessment of their traditional iconography. Beginning with painting a scene from a moving image, he then places light through the painted linen creating an ‘exposure’ onto photographic paper. This act of “moving from one form into another" dissects the stability of the image where the viewer is confronted with synchronous distance and proximity.

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In the act of reconstructing and reappropriating existing images, the pairing of these artists, exhibiting together for the first time, aims to proffer insight into their shared investigation of painting and photography, as well the works that result as they move between the two modes of expression. Between Genadrys' attempt to paint the same landscape profusely, and Saunders' various iterations involving the same scene, this exhibition examines the profound impact a subtle change can have on a singular image.

 

Curated by: Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani


Daniele Genadry works with painting, photography and print, to examine conditions and contemporary forms of seeing, particularly those present in postwar Lebanon. Recent solo exhibitions include: Artist Rooms at Jameel Arts Center, Beirut Art Center, Centre Intermondes and Sursock Museum, and she has participated in group exhibitions at MUCEM, Sharjah Biennial 13, Biennial del Sur, SMBA, Bronx Museum, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere among others. She was a fellow at the British School at Rome, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation and is the recipient of the 2024 Munn Artist Award in Giverny, FR. Her work is represented by Galerie In Situ – Fabienne Leclerc and Genadry lives and works in Paris, France and Beirut, Lebanon.

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Matt Saunders is an artist whose work moves between painting, photography, printmaking, and multi-screen installations with animated film. He has mounted solo exhibitions at Tate Liverpool, St. Louis Art Museum and the Renaissance Society, and participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney, MassMOCA, Sharjah Biennial, and SF MoMA among many others. His work is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery and Blum & Poe. He splits his time between New York, Berlin and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is Professor of Art, Film and Visual Studies, Director of Undergraduate Studies at Harvard University.

From left to right: Daniele Genadry Bakssine, 2021(Image courtesy of the artist & Galerie In Situ).

Matt Saunders Landscape III (Brightforset), 2015(Image courtesy of BORCH edtions)

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