THE FOLLY OF COLOUR
February 10 to March 14, 2021
Nuha Saad works with optimism and a modernist inheritance turning to colour and abstraction in a time of uncertainty and upheaval. Saad’s work identifies with both western art training and an eastern sensibility. The works exhibited in The Folly of Colour demonstrate the feeling of being in-between different cultural experiences. In the exhibition eastern forms bump up against the hard geometries of minimalist and formalist tendencies alike, but in a gentle way. One side supports the other, completes it and balances it formally.
(Michele Beevors, Principal Lecturer: Sculpture and Ceramics, Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic). More
EXHIBITION ESSAY
The Folly of Colour (pdf)
By Michele Beevors, Principal Lecturer: Sculpture and Ceramics, Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic
SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY
November 3 – 21 November, 2021
Nuha Saad and Hayley Megan French
Exhibiting side by side for the first time, Sydney-based artists Hayley Megan French and Nuha Saad grace our front exhibition space with a presentation of new paintings and sculptures where the colours, shapes and forms of Australian suburbia are enlivened. Shifting between abstraction and representation the flat compositions and sculptural forms featured in the exhibition highlight the architectural and ornamental elements of our surroundings, beyond the functional, to reflect on notions of locality, community and home.
ORNAMENTAL FANCIES
October 2 – 27, 2019
For Nuha Saad the mix of Sydney formalism, colonial architectural details, and the post-pop colours of a commodity driven culture is informed by multicultural discourse. The flavour of antipodean formalism is confronted in a direct way and democratised by the play of colour on object, and the repurposing of found materials. Saad inherited the high design principles of De-stijl and the Bauhaus, the logic of the Fibonacci series, but the decoration of the iconoclast has been turned in the service of community meeting points, parks and school yard playgrounds in a vast array of public works and sculptures … Saad alludes reflexively to a new era for the expression of post-colonial discourses by highlighting marginalised and overlooked spaces and objects which is positive, complete and optimistic. (Michele Beevors 2019).
EXHIBITION ESSAY
Antipodean formalism and post-pop (pdf)
By Michele Beevors, Principal Lecturer, Dunedin School of Art Otago Polytechnic.
1717 PAINTING/NOT PAINTING
November 22 – December 16, 2017
The persistence of painting
In this era artists are no longer defined by their media, and often approach their choice of medium as part of a broader conceptual practice. Artists are therefore free to use the idea of paint, or the actual medium itself, in ways that challenge its presuppositions. 1717 Painting/not painting follows an interest in artists that use the idea of painting, or the application of paint, in new and unexpected ways. The seventeen artists included in this exhibition illustrate a process of enquiry that is the result of an ongoing dialogue with the medium.
Artists: Kevin Chin; Will Cooke; Fernando do Campo; Stefan Dunlop; Neil Haddon; Irene Hanenbergh; Brent Harris; Matthew Harris; Daniel Hollier; Belem Lett; Ollie Lucas; Tara Marynowsky; Nuha Saad; Kate Tucker; Megan Walch; Tricky Walsh and Ian Williams.
Curator: George Adams
EXHIBITION ESSAY
The persistence of painting (pdf)
By Melissa Loughnan Founding director of Utopian Slumps and author of Australiana to Zeitgeist: An A to Z of Australian Contemporary Art.
MEDIA
Altmedia 28 Nov. 2017. 1717 Painting/not painting
By Rita Bratovich.
Artwork details: Velvet Constellations, 2017, Flock wallpaper, acrylic, satin, 254(h )x 212(w) cm, plywood, acrylic on turned wooden elements