UNFOLDED

About

Internationally renowned architect Michel Abboud, founder of award-winning architectural practice SOMA, has announced the opening of his debut solo art exhibition at Philippe Hoerle-Guggenheim’s New York City gallery, HG Contemporary, taking place on September 27th2018, from 6 till 9 pm.

In recent years he had begun to combine art and architecture by creating large-scale parametric sculptures. For him, art is as process-based as his architecture but it does not make it any less of an emotional endeavor. 

“Unfolded is my debut solo exhibition in New York. After dedicating close to twenty years to my architecture career, I have finally decided to showcase a selected body of work of my first and life-long passion – Art. My work is all about an internal process that involves the canvas, the body and my emotions. It is simply out of the need to create and embrace a side of myself that I have kept hidden until now that I’m exhibiting this selection of works.”

This exhibition showcases his work of the past two years, which is heavily influenced by his childhood in a war-torn environment. Born in Beirut in 1977, he lived his first thirteen years in a violent civil war that he survived but never disremembered. Daily scenes of bloody explosions, car bombs, artillery attacks were common and left deep wounds that he repressed for over twenty years, until he faced his canvas one day and recognized that the violence of his art was engrained in the scars of his painful memories. The conflicts he witnessed as a child recurred throughout his life in the form of inner conflicts, conflicts of identity, conflicts in relationships, conflicts between the artist and his body of art. 

The exhibition finally leads to his latest sculptural pieces of folded canvas on canvas that came as a result of years of experimentation with the materiality of form and content.

“After investigating the possibilities of manipulating the actual paint matter in a sculptural and material process, I have then proceeded to explore the physical support itself: the canvas. By stripping it from its frame, then slicing it, in order to finally fold it on to itself, I aim to blur the distinctions between content and container, support and object, medium and product. Both architecture and art are linked, identities are blurred but also merged. The dual conflicting nature of this process is at the essence of my art. “