Rosalind Nashashibi: Hooks

In February 2023, Nottingham Contemporary will present the largest exhibition to date of London-based artist Rosalind Nashashibi’s paintings.

By turns lush, fractured and dream-like, this body of work – titled Hooks – has been developed over the course of the last year. These new paintings are concerned with mirroring, monograms and the question of a “signature” style, by way of curtains and split surfaces. The poet and critic Quinn Latimer has written that Nashashibi’s paintings “move easily between biomorphic abstraction and figuration, something organic and aching, the pastoral and the social.”

Nashashibi’s films have been exhibited for two decades, though since 2014 she has returned more and more to painting, which she initially studied at art school. In 2020, Nashashibi was the National Gallery’s first-ever artist-in-residence. During her residency, she developed a new body of work, titled An Overflow of Passion and Sentiment, responding to the National Gallery’s 17th-century Spanish paintings, by Velázquez, Ribera and Zurburán. Nashashibi mingled specific motifs and gestures drawn from these works with sources from film and literature, as well as her own family. She has recently completed a new film, titled Denim Sky (2022). Four years in the making, this trilogy explores time travel, community and communication.

About the artist

Rosalind Nashashibi (b. 1973, Croydon, UK) was the recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation award, Whitechapel Gallery’s John Kobal New Work Award, and was the first female artist to receive Beck’s Futures Art Prize in 2003. In 2017 Nashashibi was shortlisted for the Turner Prize.

Recent solo exhibitions include Monogram, Musée Art Contemporain Carré d’Art, Nîmes (FR); Monogram, Radvila Palace Museum of Art, Vilnius (LT); Darkness and Rest, GRIMM, New York, NY (US); Artium Museum, Vitoria-Gasteiz (ES); An Overflow of Passion and Sentiment, National Gallery, London (UK); Rosalind Nashashibi, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); Green Hearts, CAAC, Seville (ES); Future Sun, S.M.A.K., Ghent (BE); Vivian’s Garden, The High Line, New York, NY (US).

Recent group exhibitions include Someone said that the world’s a stage, GRIMM, New York, NY (US); Vivian Suter Retrospective, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern (CH); Inaugural exhibition, GRIMM, New York, NY (US); Summer Exhibition 2020, Royal Academy of Arts, London (UK); Away in the Hill, GRIMM, New York, NY (US); Cinéma du Réel festival, Centre Pompidou and Forum des Images, Paris (FR).

Selected collections include the National Gallery, London (UK); Tate, London (UK); The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (US); Centre Pompidou - Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris (FR); British Arts Council (UK); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (US); Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris (FR); The Art Institute of Chicago, IL (US); National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (UK).