Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde felt there was no need to staple a clever title onto this show of 11 artists, because Nice Drawings came about via a simple request for some of the gallery’s friends and collaborators to send over a new drawing:
Nesa Azadikhah | Niyaz Azadikhah | Abdelkader Benchamma | Ramin Haerizadeh | Rokni Haerizadeh | Nargess Hashemi | Mohammed Kazem | Jessica Mein | Farshid Maleki | Hesam Rahmanian | Haleh Redjaian
The responses were neither conventional or necessarily ‘nice’ drawings: Pencil-like lines are formed in an unthreaded rice bag, bikinied women wrestle on a barren beach of blank paper, a sequence of sketched-on photographs can be read like a sentence. A sculptural ink drawing of a mauve mountain range reveals its grandeur to be nothing more than a flimsy film set. Nonsensical faux-architectural drawings depict a room in absurd dimensions, shreds of family photographs are finished and made caustic with graphite, the rigidity of lines on a grid is only a cover for artful errors.
Despite the playful title, each of these artists approaches the act and habit of drawing from a slant perspective, whether it’s finding ways to draw without necessarily ending up with a drawing or turning absent-minded doodling into a private subversion.
Nice Drawings marks 10 years since Isabelle van den Eynde first organised an exhibition in Dubai. The show presents very new work by some of the co-conspirators the gallery has worked with along the way, and is a friendly sidestep away from overarching concepts or rigorous titles.
