CARBON 12
Skip to main content
  • Menu
  • Artists
  • Exhibitions
  • News & Press
  • Publications
  • DIANA
  • Contact
  • Upcoming
  • Past
  • Online

The Errantries of Sarah Almehairi and Bernhard Buhmann: Sarah Almehairi & Bernhard Buhmann | Duo Exhibition

Past exhibition
18 September - 9 November 2024
  • Press release
  • Works
  • Installation Views
  • Press
  • Overview
Sarah Almehairi Off Centered Closing, 2024 Acrylic on wood and canvas 45 x 30 cm 17 3/4 x 11 3/4 in
Sarah Almehairi
Off Centered Closing, 2024
Acrylic on wood and canvas
45 x 30 cm
17 3/4 x 11 3/4 in
View works
The recent paintings of Sarah Almehairi and Bernhard Buhmann enact profound re-routings. Through unexpected protrusions and punctures, the artists have initiated progressions in their stories that are, as the philosopher Édouard Glissant describes it, “a poetics of errantry,” both adventurous wanderings and rebellious misdirections. Referencing forms and motifs from within their past works, the artists lure us in with the familiar, only to journey to new discoveries and connections. For Almehairi, this process entails a build-up of layers that may weave and collude, but remain—as the series title states—“off centered.” Inversely, within Buhmann’s latest works, an erasure has occurred, and this removal is at times a wound.
 
Almehairi’s current interest in overlapping appendages amplifies her longstanding awareness that every surface, no matter how flat, is actually sculptural. She works through an intuitive process of marks and layers, and suggests that “aesthetics are a way of thinking.” Her systems of linear measurement are in part related to practices of 20th century minimalism, especially the grids of Agnes Martin, but Almehairi’s measurements never provide a rational conclusion; they instead look at phenomena—roots, weights, silence, the celestial, footsteps—from another perspective, with emphasis on the imperfect and a lack of symmetry. Buhmann is similarly concerned with notions of (im)perfection. Viewing his paintings as evolving characters, his recent works are, as he puts it, a “detox version,” cast out into the world with certain elements removed. His mechanical-biomorphic portraits have here been subjected to tribulations— sickliness, bites, slashes, teardrops—all afflictions that call to mind Buhmann’s sustained interest in Caravaggio.
 
How do Buhmann and Almehairi reassemble the infinite fragmentations of reality that result from errantries? Tromp l’oeil—or as Glissant would describe it, fugitivity—provides one possibility: painted shadows and torn paper, pictures within pictures, a confusion of gravity and weightlessness, a blurring of foreground and distance. Lines meander, overlap, and abruptly stop, like dismantled timelines of rejected histories. The artists also share a fixation on the possibilities within color gradations, an effect that provides relationships between forms, but also blurs boundaries. The designer Ryan Gerald Nelson has suggested transgressive potentials within the gradient, noting that it “moves, transitions, progresses, defies being defined as one thing. It formalizes difference across a distance.”
 
And the color palettes of Buhmann and Almehairi have unexpectedly entered into a synchronicity; as Buhmann muses, the mystery of inspiration is an inherent quality of painting, “whether you like it or not.” In this joint installation, we are offered the chance to commune with the beautiful frailties and strange intimacies that can only occur through an unplanned encounter.
 
-Terri Geis, Associate Professor of Art, New York University Abu Dhabi
 
 
94
Download Press Release

Related artists

  • Sarah Almehairi

    Sarah Almehairi

  • Bernhard Buhmann

    Bernhard Buhmann

Back to Past exhibitions
Manage cookies
Facebook, opens in a new tab.
Twitter, opens in a new tab.
Instagram, opens in a new tab.
Join the mailing list
Send an email
View on Google Maps

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Manage cookies
Accept

Cookie preferences

Check the boxes for the cookie categories you allow our site to use

Cookie options
Required for the website to function and cannot be disabled.
Improve your experience on the website by storing choices you make about how it should function.
Allow us to collect anonymous usage data in order to improve the experience on our website.
Allow us to identify our visitors so that we can offer personalised, targeted marketing.
Save preferences
Close

Join our mailing list

Subscribe to our mailing list

* indicates required