Art Fair Dates: Tuesday 19 – Sunday 24 November 2024

Opening hours:

Patrons and Collectors Preview, invitation only: Tuesday 19 November (5-9 pm) & Wednesday 20 November (1-2 pm)

Public opening hours: Wednesday 20 - Sunday 24 November (2-9 pm)

Address: Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Booth: A30 (Hall A)

Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to announce its participation at Abu Dhabi Art 2024, where we will showcase new works by 3 London-based artists: Cara Nahaul, Sikelela Owen,and Richard Burton.

With unique and contrasting approaches to painting, the artists are unified by themes of memory, place and our experiences of the world we live in. All three artists, born in the mid-1980s, are from the same generation, living and working in London.

Cara Nahaul’s (b. 1987) work has a dream-like, serene quality. Influenced by her desire to investigate memory and the significance of place, Nahaul recalls her experiences of Mauritius, where her father and grandparents are from, taking the landscapes that form the backdrop of her childhood for the subject of her work. The considered and balanced compositions provide just enough to create a complete sense of the environment, whilst concurrently leaving out visual information and details that are lost to the sands of time. What remains of her memories feels like the essential impression of the place. The omission of such details creates a distance between the viewer and the place which Nahaul recalls, signalling a feeling of nostalgia and ethereality.

Her works portray spaces where nature meets domesticity, organic shapes shroud around the homes, giving a sense of the lush landscape beyond. No figures are visible but human presence is felt, just out of reach. This feeling of loneliness is open to interpretation; one might perceive it as melancholic and isolated, or perhaps associate it with a feeling of calm and contentedness. The vibrant, pastel colour pallet exudes a warmth that alludes to an affection that the artist has for these memories. She sketches the compositions directly on to the canvas, letting the scene evolve naturally. Minimalistic shapes are used as building blocks, each part guiding the next. She plays with negative and positive space; solid planes of colour interact at their borders, forming fluid dynamic lines that create a push and pull between the foreground and the background. The way in which each form sits upon the next is reminiscent of the way in which one can experience memory: a piece of information can spark the remembrance of another, small details developing into a larger image in the mind’s eye. The scene is flattened into a single plane, observable in entirety from a distance, much like the artist’s recollections of the past.

Nahaul did a BA (Hons) Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths University, London, followed by an MFA Fine Art at Parsons The New School for Design, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Alexander Berggruen (New York), Galerie Camille Pouyfaucon (Paris) and Taymour Grahne Projects (London), and an upcoming solo exhibition at Frestonian Gallery (London). Group exhibitions include Alexander Berggruen Gallery (New York), Sargent’s Daughters (LA) and The Hole (New York and LA). She has been selected for the John Moores Painting Prize twice, the inaugural Jerwood Painting Fellowship, nominated for the Contemporary British Painting Prize and completed public commissions for Vital Arts and Hospital Rooms.

Richard Burton’s (b. 1987) paintings, ‘A Warm Place’ and ‘Counting’ are part of an ongoing series which focuses on exploring the beauty and banality of upholstered surfaces. The works exemplify Burton’s ability to depict imagined forms that play with our perception of the real world. Inspired by the concept of worldbuilding, used by Science Fiction story tellers to create credible, fictionalised worlds, Burton constructs paintings that feel eerily familiar to the viewer yet slightly adjacent to what is real. His attention to light and texture give a tangible substance to the objects, whilst the stable, linear compositions echo the man-made essence of the forms. The tangibility is enhanced by the unique texture of his paintings; Burton adds sand to his canvases in preparation for the paint, giving the works a stronger impression of solidity and three-dimensionality.

Richard’s thoughtful approach to balance and line adds an air of the neoclassical style, which favoured harmony, simplicity and restraint. The cropped compositions are constrained yet expansive. Details of something much larger, they allude to the world beyond the confines of the canvas. He makes use of scale in a way that emphasises the precision of the man-made world, zooming in and dissecting the space into rigid, linear shapes. The manufactured forms are brought to life by luminous beams of directional light, transforming the minimal and mundane into the enigmatic. Though imagined, the forms are painted with such a mathematical precision, they seem to be real. However, the lack of environment and context cause the familiarity of the objects to simultaneously feel foreign. Burton has a unique, hyper-real approach to abstraction. The simple, yet highly technical paintings, feel complete and substantial, despite their lack of definitive place or personal clues. Burton’s imagined, inanimate world, is an uncanny representation of the digital, man-made world that we reside.

Richard Burton graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2021, shortly after completing his MA he was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries and was awarded an Abbey Fellowship in Painting at The British School at Rome. In 2023, he was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize and selected for the residency programme at Palazzo Monti. Previous exhibitions include Taymour Grahne Projects, Royal Academy, Incubator 21, South London Gallery and other venues in the UK and internationally. Burton lives and works in London.

Sikelela Owen’s (b. 1984) paintings present candid figures immersed in hazy landscapes, often in repose or unassuming moments of connection. She captures the essence of being and the fluctuating nature of kinship, intimacy and isolation. The use of lime greens and warm browns is quintessential to her practice, washed over the canvas in layers that evoke movement and dynamism. The visible, expressive brushstrokes convey the artist’s desire to capture fleeting states of calm and the brief moments of existence when we cease to be self-aware. The translucency of the paint has a glowing effect, light seems to be shining from behind the canvas, peaking through the figures as if illuminated from within.

By omitting revealing elements of the surrounding area, her figures possess a celestial and timeless quality; we can feel the truthfulness of the moment though the context remains ambiguous. The artist utilizes the titles of her works as an opportunity to anchor them to her personal reality. ‘Park Life 2023 (Tina, Ethan and Kaiden)’ and ‘Kaiden (in Battersea Park)’ affirm her connection to the paintings and the figures depicted. She portrays lived moments of real people, but with a remoteness that allows us to recognise these scenes as akin to our own memories. Owen taps into the universal experience of at once being connected yet alone, and the dichotomy of love and solitude. Her depictions of children emanate the innocence and purity of youth, as exemplified in ‘Kaiden (in Battersea Park)’, which portrays a close friend’s child in a moment of reflection, arms crossed, just before resuming play again. The moment calls attention to the emotional depth of a child’s experience, giving recognition and validation to feelings which are often undermined or looked past. Her continued fascination with childhood blends her observations of her children with memories of her own youth, exploring the cyclical nature of life and the feelings that connect us.

Sikelela Owen RA Elect (B.1984) lives and works in London. She holds a postgraduate diploma in Fine Art from the Royal Academy and a BA Fine Art in Painting from Chelsea College of Art and Design. Recent solo exhibitions include at Tiwani Contemporary, James Freeman Gallery, HSBC Canada Place and LDM gallery. She has had exhibitions with Taymour Grahne Projects, Dulwich Gallery, Walker Art Gallery, Beers Gallery, Gesso Arts Space, British School at Rome, The Mall Gallery and Charlie Smith London. Awards and residencies include Abbey Award Scholar Rome, Spaces Studio Award, Elephant Lab, Dover Streets Arts club award, Richard Ford Award (Prado Museum travel and drawing award, Madrid) and Nichol Young Foundation Award.