The Two Walks: Works on Paper Selected by Judy Karkour

CARBON 12 is delighted to present The Two Walks, a group show of new and archival works on paper selected by Judy Karkour. Bringing together 14 artists with distinct material and artistic backgrounds, the exhibition explores paper as a medium that challenges scale as grandiose. Each artist uses and manipulates it in different ways that expand beyond its traditional associations.

 

The Two Walks refers to the corridor that souls use to travel between worlds, to the thousand lives that live within one, and to those who resist conformity. There is something uniquely revealing about working with paper. It is completely within this intimate arena that artists have the ability to express hidden existential thoroughfare, complex intentions, and explore innovative techniques. Paper works are often associated with sketches, a predecessor to the fully realized work. Here, that notion shifts. These works are complete, and they reinforce paper's transformative potential and its importance throughout various practices.

 

Sarah Almehairi’s collage works emphasize the compositional characteristics of intuitive layering and building, examining the construction of systems through their deconstruction.

 

Faris Alshafar’s practice is informed by time-bound sensory experiences. Memories of these experiences are perceived as self-contained universes, as distinct forms and textures emerge through rhythmic mark-making and layered abstractions.

 

Olaf Breuning’s Not Even Drinks Make Us Happy (2005) continues to reflect the times for over 20 years. With his innate comic style - and in contrast to all other media he works with – he considers drawing the simplest. The world of immediate thoughts becomes his.

 

Bernhard Buhmann’s collage, Shelter, continues his exploration into the tensions that arise between individuality and collective norms.

 

André Butzer’s Untitled falls between abstraction and figuration. Created clandestinely in 2013, during the high time of his acclaimed N-Paintings, here his iconic figure of the Woman takes the center of attention. Though Butzer is a self-proclaimed colorist, his simple pencil drawings are raw but distinctive, at times even tender and they all reinforce his unique balance of absurdity, social divisions, and child-like innocence.

 

The comedic tone and absurd conditions in Nadine Ghandour’s works serve as a comment on the impositions of architecture, delving into rapid urban development, creating fiction out of cities that grow at hyper speeds.

 

Monika Grabuschnigg’s drawing of hanging floral arrangements with lush satin bows evokes a visceral awareness of the brevity of our lives as we witness their own withering, preemptively grieving for themselves, for all of us.

 

In Study of a Seated Man #5, 6, 7, 8 Amir Khojasteh depicts this recurring motif. Grappled with uncertainties, sadness, and paradoxes, he shapes an abstract narrative based on immediate feelings far from imitation.

 

Nour Malas engages in spontaneous gestures exposing and transporting to endless inner voids as a chronicle of confrontations, emotion and spontaneity - continuing her exploration into matrilineal relationships and how they have shaped the person she is.

 

Solimar Miller’s practice engages with the region’s evolving ecological landscape, focusing on the study and documentation of indigenous flora and fauna, addressing environmental fragility and biodiversity loss linked to climate change.

 

Philip Mueller’s pencil and watercolor work is embedded with his inherent cacophonous scenes. Highlighting the point where the unknown divine, the familiar human world, and the absurd meet, Mueller contrasts softness and lightness brought by a myriad of symbolism instilled within the work.

 

Mayar Obedo uses Ghar (Aleppo laurel - غار) soap to create block prints on handmade recycled paper of fragments inspired by destroyed Syrian artifacts and human remains found in mass graves, marking a shift in the artist’s developing practice. As part of a larger research about the materiality of the soap, these prints allow him to explore how it engages with other materials, creating imprints that preserve traces of bodies, histories, and objects that no longer fully exist.

 

Edgar Orlaineta’s practice is instilled with immediacy. In his drawing, Cosmic Craftsman (Woman), the most important aspect is the technique used: colored pencil on a black background. The figures depicted are part Mexican Judas, part Modulor (Le Corbusier). They are also influenced by the cosmic figuration of Rufino Tamayo and by the Universal Constructivism of Joaquín Torres-García.

 

Amba Sayal-Bennett explores drawing as a process of unveiling. The depicted machinic forms explore the medium as an apparatus of production through its form-building capacity. Taking pleasure in the virtual, Sayal-Bennett investigates the emergence of form through the inherent incompleteness of drawing.