Chinatown, New York
Nour Mobarak
Recto Verso
Miguel AbreuMiguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to present Nour Mobarak's Recto Verso, her second one-person exhibition at the gallery. Recto Verso is comprised of a series of twelve epoxy resin wall works, a pair of mycelium mini-sculptures, and a sound recording. Mobarak's long established parallel investigations of organic and inorganic material resolutely shifts toward the latter category in this new body of work. Following a three-year commitment to developing and producing Dafne Phono, a large-scale sculptural installation based on the first opera ever written – recently presented at The Piraeus Municipal Theater, Greece, and MoMA, New York – "I wanted to do something that would allow me to just immerse myself back into the corporeal, into my body," notes the artist, "while also performing some kind of irreverent gesture […] The impulse, the gesture is somewhat absurd, but then there's something deeply serious about just falling into complete exploration of form." Simply put, the work also emerged as a reaction to the increasingly unsettling geopolitical situation of the world. "Every artistic action, every political gesture I could think of," says Mobarak, "seemed to fall short when confronted with the gravity of what is happening." A direct bodily print as both the source and expressive content of a work has a modest, yet unquestionable quality that felt appropriate. The vibrant liquid pigments Mobarak pours into the translucent resin she shapes into tablets contribute to manifest the raw attributes of the used materials as they mix. The transparency component reveals recto verso the varied thicknesses of the rectangular relief objects installed at a slight remove from the wall. The result of impressing her body into the sensational, yet lifeless epoxy that won't decompose, these works stand in striking contrast to their biotic, mycelium sculpture counterparts. There is a kind of joyous, exuberant immediacy emanating from these colorful pictures, something in the order of the irresistible. Nour Mobarak (b. 1985, Cairo, Egypt) lives and works between Bainbridge Island, WA and Athens, Greece. One-person exhibitions of her work have been held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2024), The Municipal Theater at Piraeus, Greece (2023), Rodeo London (2023), Joan, Los Angeles (2022), Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2021), and Hakuna Matata, Los Angeles (2020). Her works have been included in group shows at Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Art Contemporanea, Turin (2024), Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2023), California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2024), MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2022), Amant, Brooklyn (2022), Rodeo Piraeus (2022), Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2020), Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2019), Cubitt, London (2019), and Rodeo London (2017), among others. Her performances have been staged at the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2022), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2020), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019), LAXArt, Los Angeles (2019), Stadslimeit, Antwerp (2016), and Cambridge University, UK (2010), among others. Her music has been released by Recital, Los Angeles, Cafe Oto's TakuRoku, London, and Ultra Eczema, Antwerp, and is included in the Whitney Museum Library's Special Collections. She has had sessions on BBC Radio 3, NTS Radio, and Dublab Radio. Her poetry has appeared in Triple Canopy, F.R. David, The Claudius App, and Poetry Salzburg Review, among others. Publications include Dafne Phono, Wendy's Subway, New York (2024) and Sphere Studies and Subterranean Bounce, Recital, Los Angeles (2021). Mobarak's work is being included in the forthcoming Magical Realism at Wiels, Brussels, and in Material Evidence at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto.