January 11 - February 22, 2017
GHADAH ALKANDARI
Until
"Two years ago I constructed my first origami polyhedron. I was unaware that this one object would be instrumental in shaping many paintings and stories to come. And many, many polyhedra to follow. But such is the pattern that plays itself out in my life as an artist: creations are influenced by both the banal and the important in life, not imitating art but mirroring it.
As I prepared for this exhibition, the mood of my work kept shifting from purpose to purpose. Until love, until peace, until I’m settled in a place I want to be. Always waiting for the big Until."
Ghadah Alkandari is a Kuwaiti artist born in Delhi in 1969. In 1992 she received a BA in Mass Communications from the American University in Cairo. But it was a six-week painting course at the School of Visual Arts that “shaped my current painting style, which was also influenced early on by both classical painters: Cezanne, Matisse, Schiele, Modigliani and Klimt, and comic books: Mad Magazine, Archie and Asterix.”
Her body of work ranges from large-scale acrylic paintings, primarily figurative, exploring the wide spectrum of human emotion and familial complexities, to smaller intimate pen and ink surreal drawings detached and focused on everyday happenings.
The artist had numerous solo exhibitions in Kuwait, and has participated in several group exhibitions locally and internationally, including the Arab Culture in Diaspora exhibition in Kuwait, Femmes Artistes Du Koweit at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (2006), Approaches to Figurative Practices at the Third Line Gallery, Dubai (2007), and JAMM Contemporary Art Auction in Kuwait (2010).
Since 2009, Ghadah Alkandari uses her blog ‘prettygreenbullet’ as a platform to display her work on a daily basis.