Espadrilles

2019 - Painting (Painting)

30 x 40 cm

Rosalind Nashashibi

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Rosalind Nashashibi’s paintings incorporate motifs drawn from her day-to-day environment, often reworked with multiple variations. The development of colour palettes in her painting work could be compared to the work in her films where she delicately draws an internal visual language which provides the viewer equal space to her protagonists. Possible readings of her work are left deliberately open, encouraging thought in terms of association rather than the imposition of a narrative structure. This painting was first presented as part of an exhibition entitled ‘Future Sun’ at SMAK in Ghent with the artist’s long term collaborator Lucy Skaer, which took Ursula K Le Guin’s 1990 The Shoobie’s Story as its main inspiration, instigating an investigation into non-linear time. In the work, the body is alluded to, however it remains difficult to imagine its position within a space.

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Rosalind Nashashibi is a filmmaker and artist based in London. Her practice includes painting, engraving and photography. Best known for her film work, she has more recently begun to focus on her painting practice once again. Drawing on a male-dominated history of painting, she confronts such work head on, most explicitly maybe with her portrait of the painter Gaugin following the 2017 film Why Are You Angry? made in collaboration with artist Lucy Skaer. The film reclaims the exoticized depictions of women painted by the artist and challenges the colonial and gendered violence that pervade in such work. Where her paintings are both abstract and figurative, imbued with bright colors and vague forms, her films focus on the minute details of the lives of her subjects in their respective environments—from exiled mother daughter artists in Guatemala to friends and family in Gaza—in order to describe and explore different kinds of relationships. Her films present non-linear narrations, punctuated by scenes that reveal the power relations and intimacy between people, all while continually linking individual and collective histories.

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Colors:

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• art_history.n.01
• relationship.n.02
• one-dimensionality.n.01
• gaze.v.01
• investigation.n.02
• british