Vardaxoglou Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition with London-based painter Shaan Syed. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with Vardaxoglou Gallery. 

The exhibition brings together a group of previously unseen large-scale paintings made in recent years, showing the development of Syed’s distinct visual language. Creating a tension between the graphic lines of flat hard-edge abstraction and gestural mark-making, Syed’s approach to painting is one of decoding and recontextualising visual signs and references drawn from European and American post-modern painting, married with those of his own experience and background. As the son of a Pakistani Muslim father and a British Protestant mother, growing up in Canada, Syed explores the meanings of holding certain identities and their consequent influences for creating and looking at art. 

The group of paintings in Extended Family show the many revisions and changes undergone throughout their making, epitomising Syed’s concept of painting as “a process of reverse archaeology”, where material is added in order to uncover.  Syed repeatedly paints a stepped motif, originating from a picture of the giant spiral minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra (Iraq, 9th c. C.E.).  

By flattening the minaret’s spiral in order to divide the picture plane, the artist creates a space informed by negotiation and reciprocity.  The artist’s painting process is a system of back and forth, whereby one side of the canvas is painted, and the other side is painted in response. This process reflects a call and response, returning to the practical purpose of a minaret (the call to prayer), and speaks to the work involved in both painting and looking.  

In other paintings, Syed references the fetishization of the rug weaving tradition of the North-African Berber Muslims (‘Things White People Like (Berber Painting)’), or the forming and drying of cow dung into cakes to be used for building and fuel (‘Foundation; Goitha’), seen on roadsides during the artist’s travels in rural India.  In this painting, the distinctive shapes of broken pieces of glass are embedded below thick layers of oil paint, suggesting an underlying violence which Syed has been exploring through his research into Partition and his family’s experience of having to flee India into Pakistan.

These motifs, materials, and references allegorise relationships of difference, reflecting on the artist’s own straddling of cultures. Often drawing comparisons and similarities across histories, the exhibition explores traditions and contemporary preoccupations which have historically been considered part of vastly different worlds. 

For further information please contact info@vardaxoglou.com.