Alina Szapocznikow. Untitled, 1970-1971; ink on laid paper; 24 13/16 x 18 7/8 in. Courtesy of the Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanislawski/Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris. © ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Fabrice Gousset.

Fifteen drawings in ink, felt-tip pen, and watercolor on paper are arranged in five groups of three, with each group emphasizing a subtly different aspect of her style. Viewers first encounter a set of drawings in fine black ink. Body parts such as a finger or a breast are discernible, but on the whole, the aggregated contours of each drawing are predominantly suggestive rather than pictorial. Szapocznikow’s early life was shaped by the trauma of her imprisonment in two Jewish ghettoes and three Nazi concentration camps. Yet nearly thirty years after the war, her depictions are delicate, almost tender; the line work is more like a lover’s light touch than a mark of agitation, and the verticality of these images creates an upward, lifting movement.

In contrast, the figures in the second set of drawings are oriented horizontally, and definable imagery is less elusive. The pen lines of Paysage Humain [Human Landscape] (1971) stretch across the page, giving the impression of being pulled from both left and right. In the central foreground, in front of rolling hills, a shapely mound suggests a pregnant woman; curved lines and shading indicate the roundness of her swollen belly. But where a face might be, there is only a skull. Szapocznikow’s marks are energetic, established in melancholic black and dark purple. Birth and death are proximal to one another, and imminent.

Alina Szapocznikow. Paysage Humain (du cycle «Paysages Humains») [Human Landscape (from the series Human Landscapes], 1971; felt-tip pen and watercolor on cardboard; 11 13/16 x 19 3/16 in. Courtesy of the Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanislawski/Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris. © ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Fabrice Gousset.

Alina Szapocznikow. Paysage Humain III [Human Landscape III], 1971; ink, watercolor, and felt-tip
pen on paper; 9 1/2 x 12 5/8 in. Courtesy of the Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanislawski/Galerie
Loevenbruck, Paris. © ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Fabrice Gousset.

Alina Szapocznikow. Glowa Piotra/Head of Piotr, 1972; polyester; 18 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 7 1/16 in. Courtesy of the Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanislawski/Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris. © ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Fabrice Gousset.

In the center of the gallery, a lone cast-polyester sculpture on a low plinth connects the drawings with the more well-known aspect of Szapocznikow’s oeuvre. A partially flattened bust of her son, Glowa Piotra/Head of Piotr (1972) concretizes the gestures of the drawings and extends their contours into space. Rather than a counterpoint to the works on paper, the sculpture is a symbiotic complement that fixes their implied motion into a singular form. It also highlights the evanescent quality of the drawings as they trace the outlines of the corporeal: intimate, sensuous, and fragile.

Alina Szapocznikow: Human Landscape(s) is on view at Loevenbruck Gallery in Paris through May 28, 2016.

Look closely, what do you see? A blur, a suggestive motion, an image frozen in time—perhaps all of these are visible. Jwan Yosef’s paintings simultaneously contain movement, latent sexuality, tension, and flat, representational arrangements created by combining painterly techniques and unexpected material forms.

Jwan Yosef. Head, 2013; oil on Perspex; 31 ½ x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Jwan Yosef’s painting Head (2013) exemplifies the artist’s interest in portraying representationally simple motifs with potent double meanings. Head depicts a man’s head in profile, with gently closed eyelids and his lips protruding just out of the picture frame, and it has a subtle sexual quality (a topic Yosef acknowledges and embraces in his work). Is the man engaging in oral sex, fulfilling some act of pleasure just outside the edge of the painting? The figure—the head—is captured with the qualities of a film still, caught within a frozen and blurry moment, depicted in a reduced palette of colors that are rendered in a series of horizontal bands of paint seemingly pulled across a smooth surface—slick and evocative.

Jwan Yosef. Pairs, 2013; oil on Perspex; 7 ½ x 10 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Like a washed-out image from a fading television screen, Pairs (2013) is also sexually suggestive while maintaining a nuanced softness. In the painting, two nude men stand next to one another against a green-and-blue background as each holds an unfolded centerfold that depicts two women baring it all in a Playboy or Penthouse-type magazine. Perhaps the men’s devious smiles are real, painted from life, or perhaps they are merely imaginary and contextually implied. Either way, the nearly illegible faces and strong outlines of the two figures hold an aura of mischief. Yosef’s brushwork here, in soft but commanding horizontal lines, reads less like a film still and more like the static of an early color television caught between channels, or one that has been redacted or blocked from non-subscribing viewers. Painted on Perspex, Pairs was inspired by Yosef’s early work in film and video. The slickness of the surface further enhances the connection to the screens.

Jwan Yosef. Confirmation, 2013; oil on Perspex; 25 ½ x 31 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

At times, Yosef’s work verges on the purely abstract. In Confirmation (2014), the artist applies one color, a burnt Sienna, with similar horizontal brushstrokes in a variety of values. Two faces, or perhaps two halves of one face stretched apart, frame the edges of the painting as a figure stands in the center, depicted from the knees up. The singular color and the stretched brushstrokes have just enough white between the horizontal lines to challenge the eye to find a single, comfortable resting place. The painting looks like an image forced through some kind of flattening or washing-out process; the figures appear lost somewhere between places, neither here nor fully there.

Jwan Yosef. Object, 2014; oil on canvas; 49 x 39 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

In another series, the artist says each painting has “a dual meaning that translates as both an object and as something that objects.” In this series Yosef paints a representational image over thick layers of white paint, and then he bends, pulls, and manipulates the canvas into a sculptural form that seems carved from stone or made of a thick sheet of metal. With these Object works, Yosef is interested in the ambivalence between objection and objects as it relates to his family history as the child of an Armenian Christian mother and Kurdish Muslim father, two groups that have been at odds, at times violently, throughout history. Object (2014) is a purely abstract canvas painted a rich and flat white and folded in on itself, nearly dragged down the stretcher bars, and left as a monument to ambivalence. Aside from its elegant form and stark whiteness, what is intriguing about Object is the notion that there could be an image underneath the obscured folds of the canvas, erased by contortion.

Jwan Yosef. Ahmad, 2014; oil on canvas; 27 ½ x 21 ½ in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Ahmad (2014) takes Yosef’s interventionist and ambivalent strategy a step further, as he folds a portrait of his father into a three-dimensional object—a painted structural form that seems to be in the process of being crumpled. The artist’s father’s eyes, one hooded by the bent canvas, stare out with a smile and a welcoming expression.

These object canvases and Yosef’s earlier paintings ask us to consider what a painting can be, what it can embody, and how a set of simple motifs rendered in black-and-white can delve so deeply into the very nature of art making and cultural makeup—what does it mean to be an object of objection, or to object to an object based on its state of simply being real? Jwan Yosef’s paintings and sculptures are complex creations that challenge perception and the very act of representation.

Jwan Yosef was born in Syria, grew up in Sweden, and currently lives and works in London. He received his BFA from Konstfack in Stockholm and his MFA from Central Saint Martins in London. His work has been shown extensively in London and Stockholm, and internationally in group and solo exhibitions including Dallas, Madrid, New York, Vienna, Brussels, and Prague. In 2013 he received the Beers Contemporary Award for Emerging Art in Painting, and the Threadneedle Prize.

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Bortolami Gallery in New York City is currently featuring works by London based artist Peter Peri.  Peri’s show, which includes drawings, sculptures, and paintings, revolves around three figurative themes:  head, seated man, and reclining woman.  Although Peri uses these themes in each medium, his execution in each material is startlingly different.  The level of obsession and detail in the fine drawings which are created through a congestion of graphite lines on unbleached paper hint at a larger interpretation.  Upon further investigation the viewer discovers tiny obscure writing, miniature cartoon-like doodles, and his charming “Odalisque” drawing is a mirror-image rendering of Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres‘ painting with the same title.

The three sculptures in the show, however, have an element of precariousness about them.  Each is an engineered replica in steel of objects Peri originally composed using mundane objects from his home: rolls of masking tape, cassette boxes, chess sets, and calculators.  Unlike the drawings, there does not seem to be any secret code or arcane meaning in these sculptures.  The basic geometry of each of these objects serves as the most obvious choices for Peri’s figurative assemblages; circles become breasts on a reclining woman, thick rectangles serve as a man’s body topped by a circle for a head.

Peri’s paintings successfully combine both the obsessive mark-making in his drawings with the spontaneity of his sculptures.  Described as “skewed mappings of an unknown atmosphere” by the gallery, these gloomy canvases are broken up by razor-sharp line work and tonal highlight.  The background is full of haphazard drips and variations of grays, silvers and blacks, while the geometry of the lines call to mind the mathematical rigor of artists like Jack Tworkov and Sol LeWitt.

Peter Peri received his MA in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Art in London and his BA in Design at Central St. Martins School of Art and Design.  His show at Bortolami Gallery in New York is open until February 20, 2010.