Gaby Sahhar - Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon: Charity Online Auction London Tuesday, March 12, 2024 | Phillips

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  • Gaby Sahhar is a French-Palestinian artist; their rejection of binaries is reflected in a multi-disciplinary practice that spans painting, video and installation. It is an ongoing concern of Sahhar to deconstruct representations of Queerness within the public sphere, considering the impact of this representation on Queer consciousness and communities. Sahhar aims to generate conversations around migration, value systems, affordability and access within inner-city cultures. Through speculative storytelling their work illustrates the various ways psychological and physical frameworks fragment Palestinian geopolitical borders and identity.

     

    Memory of a Journey, 2024, is presented by the artist as a self-portrait; that it also resembles a mannequin’s head suggests a degree of universalism and indeed the interior view is of an urban flat share, which the artist describes as a ‘highly-relatable domestic setting’. The fragmented, disembodied head points to Sahhar’s interest in the psychological forces that work in the mind when one identifies differently, outside a dominant patriarchal, heterosexual or western matrix.

     

    Speculative storytelling, and the alchemical power of painting, afford Sahhar a hopeful vision of a time and space beyond borders, binaries and categories ‘producing positive scenes that focus on human resilience, empowerment and bodily autonomy’. Sahhar’s advocacy and community-building is evident in their initiation of Queerdirect, an LGBTQI+ artist support network and curatorial platform.

     

    Gaby Sahhar (b. 1992, London, UK) lives and works between London and Paris. Sahhar received a BA from Goldsmiths, London in 2015. Solo exhibitions include MAC VAL, Paris / The Kooples Art Prize, 2023; PAGE (NYC), New York, 2022. Group exhibitions include Fragment Gallery, New York, 2022; Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2022. Sahhar is an alumni of Whitechapel Gallery’s youth collective Duchamp & Sons; between September 2022 and May 2023, they collaborated with the present Duchamp & Sons cohort to explore ideas around public space for Escape the Slick, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2023. Forthcoming exhibitions include the Arab World Institute, Paris; Spiaggia Libera Gallery, Paris and Quench Gallery, Margate.

    • Provenance

      Donated by the artist

7

Memory of a Journey

signed and dated 'Gaby Sahhar 2024' on the overlap
oil on canvas
70 x 60 cm (27 1/2 x 23 5/8 in.)
Painted in 2024.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£4,000 - 6,000 

Sold

Contact Specialist

Olivia Taylor
Head of Sale
+44 7823 791 633
otaylor@phillips.com

Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon: Charity Online Auction

12 - 19 March 2024