Rosalind Nashashibi: Hooks

About

In February 2023, Nottingham Contemporary will present the largest exhibition to date of London-based artist Rosalind Nashashibi’s paintings.

By turns lush, fractured and dream-like, this body of work – titled Hooks – has been developed over the course of the last year. These new paintings are concerned with mirroring, monograms and the question of a “signature” style, by way of curtains and split surfaces. The poet and critic Quinn Latimer has written that Nashashibi’s paintings “move easily between biomorphic abstraction and figuration, something organic and aching, the pastoral and the social.”

Nashashibi’s films have been exhibited internationally for two decades, though since 2014 she has returned more and more to painting, which she initially studied at art school. In 2020, Nashashibi was the National Gallery's first-ever artist-in-residence. During her residency, she developed a new body of work, titled An Overflow of Passion and Sentiment, responding to the National Gallery's 17th-century Spanish paintings, by Velázquez, Ribera and Zurburán. Nashashibi mingled specific motifs and gestures drawn from these works with sources from film and literature, as well as her own family. She has recently completed a new film, titled Denim Sky (2022). Four years in the making, this trilogy explores time travel, community and communication.

In recent years, Nashashibi has had presentations at Documenta 14 (2017); fka Witte de With, Rotterdam (2018–19); Secession, Vienna (2019); and CAC Vilnius (2022).