ABU DHABI ART (NOV 15-17, 2018) October Gallery presents Rachid Koraïchi and Govinda Sah ‘Azad’ at Abu Dhabi Art

Rachid Koraïchi, Les osties bleues / Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery, London

Rachid Koraïchi’s (b. 1947 Ain Beida, Algeria) impressive oeuvre includes large installations, ceramics, sculptures, textiles and works on canvas and paper. For Koraïchi, art represents an ancient pathway into the unknown. Signs and symbols from civilisation’s oldest languages are deconstructed and abstracted in the artist’s work to elaborate a personal visual vocabulary.

In the exhibited series Les Maîtres du Temps (Masters of Time), Koraïchi explores our connections to the earth as source of life. The works comprise of white on blue canvases (entitled Les osties bleues) which complement blue on white square ceramics (created by Koraïchi with a specialised atelier in Barcelona). Koraïchi continues to use this minimal palette, at times overlain with black figures, to emphasise the graphic power of his inscriptions.

Through these pieces, Koraïchi further explores the ethereal qualities of the colour blue. In the book, Eternity is the Absence of Time, Koraïchi described blue as ‘’always connected with the heavens, (it) is the colour of invisibility,…a strange notion – perhaps – but if you look at the sea – it’s blue! Yet, cup a handful of sea-water in your hand and the blue is gone!’’ At the other pole, and central to the formal core of this body of work, lies the earth: clay fired as pottery.

Rachid Koraïchi’s work is represented in major public collections, including the British Museum, London, UK; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, New York, USA; the Newark Museum, Newark, USA; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, Cairo, Egypt; the National Museum Gallery, Amman, Jordan; the Miami Art Museum, Miami, USA and the Smithsonian, National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C., USA. In 2011, Rachid Koraïchi won the prestigious Jameel Prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, exhibiting seven large-scale banners from The Invisible Masters series.

Rachid Koraïchi, Les osties bleues / Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery, London

Rachid Koraïchi, Les osties bleues 4, 2018. Acrylic on canvas. 30 x 30 cm / Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery, London

Govinda Sah ‘Azad’ studied Fine Arts at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal, before completing his MFA at Wimbledon College of Arts, in 2008. The artist now lives and works in London.

Govinda Sah is a painter of tempestuous skies and cosmic explosions. He imagines a cosmos of boundless possibilities. Sah’s cloud-scapes represent energy transformations between different physical states. In many traditions around the world, the cloud is an ancient symbol of connection between heaven and earth; water and air and between the natural and the supernatural. Sah effortlessly balances traditional eastern metaphysical insights about the nature of reality with visual realisations that are in accord with the latest formulations of contemporary western science.

Sah has had solo shows at October Gallery, London; Asia House, London; Nepal Art Council Gallery, Kathmandu, Nepal and National Art Gallery, Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka, Bangladesh as well as taken part in group shows at Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; Academy of Fine Art, Kathmandu, Nepal and Beppu Art Museum, Beppu, Japan.