From our friends at REORIENT, today we bring you a review from Madrid. Author María Gómez López notes that this exhibition of works connected to the city of Beirut “presents a complex network of challenges, connotations, and overlaid topics that reveal a unique and genuine vision, as well as a rediscovery of the world from a different perspective.” This article was originally published on September[…..]

Using strategies of asymmetry and organic mirroring, Julia Westerbeke explores abstraction as a vehicle of human imagination and a catalyst for subconscious thought. The artist cites science fiction and the biology of natural forms as two of her main sources of inspiration, and her paper-based explorations evoke a certain duality inherent within organic life—the ordinary morphing into the extraordinary, the mundane inspiring spurts of wonder.[…..]

Chen Zhen, who died (much too young) in Paris in 2000, was a significant artist with a hybrid Chinese and European identity. Although after 1986 he essentially lived and worked in Paris, his personal history and deep cultural roots lay in China, and specifically in Shanghai. From the mid-1990s he returned over and over to a city on fast-forward. Shanghai was undergoing a massive, controversial transformation,[…..]