ZENA ASSI

She also chooses to express this through the lens of the fantastical. A whale floats above the city. A camel walks across the rooftops. Wolves, fish, birds and insects of all kinds – a veritable bestiary – mingle with the human world. There they encounter a Phoenician figure, a little girl, a king, and a host of hybrid characters. They appear alongside a host of everyday objects – a teapot, a chair, a lamp – and others that are less so, such as soldiers, fighter planes and drones. On a different scale, these same planes are attacking a bouquet of flowers. By blurring scales of magnitude as well as the boundaries between the familiar and the strange, Zena Assi’s paintings, sculptures and ceramics create a space that is itself transitional, where the ordinary ceases to be so, and where the extraordinary is tamed.

Bottles upon which cities unfold, as on ancient vases, evoke those that are cast into the sea, bound for an unknown fate.

Columns function as archaeological remains that take us on a journey through time.

The journey through space that Assi describes is therefore also a journey through time, through ancient civilisations and mythologies, but also through the history of art. It brings together elements of Japanese print art, references to Monet, Magritte, Pop Art and, more generally, contemporary culture.

A veritable profusion of references, genres (portraits, landscapes and still lifes), surfaces and media that populate the artist’s carefully staged world thus transports us to a liminal space where the mundane and the singular, the real and the supernatural, the familiar and the unsettling, the here and the elsewhere intermingle and coexist.

A veritable profusion of references, genres (portraits, landscapes and still lifes), surfaces and media that populate the artist’s carefully staged world thus transports us to a liminal space where the mundane and the singular, the real and the supernatural, the familiar and the unsettling, the here and the elsewhere intermingle and coexist.