PATRON is proud to announce No words attached, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with New York-based artist Nour Malas. Raw gestures of oil, pastel, graphite, and charcoal, Malas’s paintings and works on paper are journalistic impressions recording the fragile reality of daily life.
For Malas, who came of age during regional instability, existence is marked by the desire for a place to call home “...my work is completely entangled with the foundation of collapse and instability, the act of searching without necessarily finding anything.” Following her study of sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Malas has developed a unique non-textual language of which stretched linen, canvas, and paper are building blocks. Driven by a need to process her own experience, Malas’s habitual studio practice is driven by a constant revisiting, questioning and translating. Urgent physical reactions to the emotive and the mundanity of her own life, Malas’s works are the result of emotional and physical release.
No words attached represents a body of work developed over the course of two months earlier this year. Materially and emotionally resonant of that chapter of life, Malas’s organic material palette is that of daily life coffee grinds, skin, egg yolks, cigarettes, flowers. Intimate spaces, moments, or memories are turned over and recalled in order to be understood through the marks they inspire. Gestural lines conjuring two turned faces are repeated over three pastel on paper works, a response, or answer to a confrontation, and impasse, a non resolution. Two beds face each other in Certified Homewrecker receding into the linen material like a distant memory, or the germination of an emotion or moment which has been excavated and kneaded through an active, ongoing act of seeking.
NOUR MALAS (b. 1995, Cannes, France) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL and a BFA from Goldsmiths University, London, UK.
Solo exhibitions include: No words attached (20204) PATRON, Chicago, IL Heavyweight (2023), Mae Lombardi Gallery, Chicago, IL; Running (2023), DIANA, New York, NY; Desperately Discontinuous Bodies (2019), Gonzo Unit, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Group exhibitions include: Daffodils Baptized in Butter (2024), The Arts Club, London, UK; Soft Focus (2024), Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal, Canada; backbone عَـمُـود الفِـقْـرِي (2024), Carbon 12, Dubai, UAE; Nocturne (2024), Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; Nice Work Forever (2023), Sulk Chicago, IL; four am: Monika Grabuschnigg & Nour Malas (2023), Carbon 12, Dubai, UAE; Nouvelle Vague (2023), LBF Contemporary, London, UK; Catnip Meow (2022), SAIC Galleries, Chicago, IL; Garage Sale 2.0 (2021), Terrain Exhibitions, Chicago, IL; I Know the End (2021), Perennial Space, Chicago, IL; Street Walk and Talk (2021), Chicago, IL; Thresholds (2018), Gonzo Unit, Thessaloniki, Greece; Feminisms x The Arab and Muslim Diaspora (2017), Protein Studios, London, UK; AWAN-Arab Women Artists Now (2017), Rich Mix, London, UK; In the Rawest Sense of the World (2013), Emirates Theatre Foyer, Dubai, UAE.
Nour Malas was the recipient of Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2024).
Image: Nour Malas, All my plants are dying on me, 2024, Oil and graphite on canvas, 60 x 48 | 152.4 x 122 cm
