Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present Cabinet of Curiosities, a solo exhibition by London-based Egyptian artist Nada Elkalaawy, opening on May 25 between 6-8pm at the Notting Hill space (1 Lonsdale Road) as part of a joint opening across our 3 spaces.

Introduction, by Róisín Tapponi

In her first UK solo exhibition, Nada Elkalaawy uses painting to visualise a dialogue between dolls, statues and women. Rooted in a formal preoccupation with figuration, Cabinet of Curiosities alludes to the collecting of objects. These objects appear in Elkalaawy’s paintings as human and non-human, living and non-living.

This exhibition itself is representative of Elkalaawy’s own cabinet of curiosities; a partly real and mostly fictitious microcosm of histories, a collection of ideas, an archive of images and narratives extracted from memories. The relations between these objects can be analysed to reveal certain fetishes, passions, and obsessions. Elkalaawy also uses the motif of putti - a cherubic figure seen in paintings of the Renaissance and Baroque period - to explore the personification of emotion, of making the ethereal visible. How do we give an image to our deepest desires?

The paintings investigate how meanings of inanimate objects can be animated and historicised by women, to reinvigorate their own art-historical image. Elkalaawy situates a set of fictitious female characters in an episteme of loneliness, asking: where might we find companionship? In the absence of intimacy, we turn to inanimate objects. The paintings subjects are reminiscent of the sentimental, lavish women in Flemish Baroque portraits, with their porcelain figurines, keepsake jewellery and other ornamental trinkets.

Despite the stillness of the figures in the paintings, we are moved. The slow drying of oil paint arrests the bodies of the subjects, who stand as still as statues, and the subjects of photographs: women from family albums, found daguerreotypes and social media posts - all which Elkalaawy uses as her references. How much distance can we obtain from the original image source before the truth of the image becomes abstracted?

Marrying mystery with familiarity, the paint is applied in a way that creates an illusion. The viewer is unsure whether the subject is an object: the bodily surfaces of the subjects vary between textures of porcelain and skin. The figures have no blemishes. Resembling the romanticism of the Rococo, their enigmatic expressions seem as much otherworldly as the rosy tropes confining them. Elkalaawy asserts that there is something haunting about porcelain, in its hollowness, and its purpose to emulate a human figure, which lacks an emotional life.

Nada Elkalaawy (b.1995) is an Egyptian artist living and working in London. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art (2018) and BA in Fine Art from Kingston University (2016). She is predominantly a painter, but also works with drawing, animation, and tapestry. Elkalaawy recently had solo shows at Taymour Grahne Projects (London), Galerie DuflonRacz (Bern) and Gypsum Gallery (Cairo), with forthcoming shows at Half Gallery (New York), Taymour Grahne Projects (London), Super Super Markt (Berlin) and Kirki Projects (Tinos). She participated in group shows in numerous venues including: Marlborough Gallery (London); Svetova1 (Prague); Kunstraum Dreiviertel (Bern); KINO DER KUNST (Munich); Sharjah Art Gallery (Cairo); Shubbak Festival (London); Southwark Park Galleries (London); Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz (Berlin); Nahim Isaias Museum (Guayaquil) and Refugees Museum (Thessaloniki) amongst others. Her work has been shortlisted for the Sainsbury Scholarship for the British School at Rome, the Waverton Art Prize, the ACS Studio Prize, Contemporary British Painting Prize, the Dentons Art Prize, and the Sarabande Emerging Art fund. It has also been published in Vogue Arabia, the Evening Standard, Sky News Arabia and Jdeed magazine. Elkalaawy has been awarded the Pro Helvetia Studio Residency, PROGR (Bern); Montresso Art Foundation (Marrakech) and L’appartement 22 (Rabat). She also participated in public events and talks including COP26 commission project for Liverpool Arab Arts Festival; Ujamaa National Trust commission project and TASHWEESH festival, Goethe Institute (Cairo). Alongside her art practice, Elkalaawy co-founded artist group ‘K-oh-llective’, recipient of Mophradat’s Self-Organizations grant (2020), which aims to facilitate opportunities and collective conversations around art practices in Egypt and the Arab world. Her work is included in the X Museum collection (Beijing), Soho House collection (London) and private collections worldwide.