Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to announce its participation at 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair’s tenth London edition, where the gallery will present works by NYC-based artist Nadia Ayari and London based artists Cara Nahaul, Nada Elkalaawy and Sikelela Owen.

Cara Nahaul (B.1987, London) is an artist living and working in London. Her current solo show at Taymour Grahne Projects will be on view until Oct 22. Taking inspiration from her childhood visits to Malaysia and Mauritius, her work examines how interiors and landscapes can become sites to reflect upon memory, culture and identity. In these works, pink palms sway against lemon hued skies, row boats lay scattered across scarlet beaches, and periwinkle mountains loom in the distance. Warming and alluring, these invented settings shift between the highly fictive and fantastically real, alluding to a personal and psychological undercurrent that quietly reverberates throughout. This year, Nahaul is publishing a lithographic print and a limited-edition monograph that replicates the look and feel of an artist sketchbook in collaboration with Taymour Grahne Projects' sister company Cactus Moon Studio.

Nada Elkalaawy (B.1995, Alexandria, Egypt) is an artist living and working in London. Elkalaawy's next solo show will take place at Taymour Grahne Projects in May 2023. Her work is part of the X Museum collection (Beijing). Elkalaawy explores the possibilities of representation and how human perception distinguishes reality from apparition and all the stages in-between. Her most recent body of work explores the uncanny presence and materiality of Meissen figurines, focusing on the contrast between the solidity of the medium and its fluid look. The paintings develop a visual language of doubling and mirroring, shaped by a compelling interplay between foreground and background, animation, and rigidity, past and present, reality and fiction.

Nadia Ayari (B. 1981) is an artist originally from Tunisia now living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her first IRL solo show with Taymour Grahne Projects 'We Saw Stars' took place in September 2021. Last year, her works were included in MOMA PS1’s “Greater New York” show and are part of the MACAAL (Marrakesh) and X Museum (Beijing) collections. This year Ayari's work was featured in the new Phaedon publication 'Great Women Painters', which is officially launching on October 6. Ayari's paintings straddle abstraction and figuration - with a set of stylized protagonists borrowed from the flora of her native North Africa, the compositions often negotiate personal and political views. In her most recent works, Ayari introduces the Flower, a motif where forty-eight different tones of pink are carefully combined using a wet-on-wet painting technique.

Sikelela Owen (B.1984, UK) is an artist living and working in London. Her first solo show with Taymour Grahne Projects 'Steady Love' took place in November 2021. Her works are part of the MACAAL (Marrakesh) and X Museum (Beijing) collections and she is actively becoming a part of the zeitgeist and the important renaissance in the painting of Black figures. In Owen's paintings, that focus on moments of love and connectivity, figures are made up of curved limbs, shoulders that heed, and outstretched arms that knowingly contour to the shape of a cohort. These bodies are never quite separate, rarely angular;
they are people, personalities, and faces that seldom exist without the physical presence or memory of another. Owen takes these figures from family photographs and stills, merging them with art historical references from the past and present.