20 YEARS OF EVELYN ASHAMALLAH

SUNDAY, June 2nd, 2013 at 6 PM - June 23rd, 2013

Evelyn Ashamallah is a determined destiny. Her works, rooted from childhood through adolescence and adulthood; occupied infantile notions of supernatural needs and desires, that then grew into metaphysical constituents towards the human soul. Her approach to the natural mind brought about its playfulness, from the natural landscapes born from a village in Kafr El Sheikh, to the mountainous layouts and portraits of Algeria in the late 1970s. Towards the mid-80s, Ashamallah had returned from Algeria and continued to focus on portraits and plants, in an abstract manner which then grew into figural distortions – out of oil, came wax and acrylic. In 1996, Ashamallah’s playfulness became her principal format. Her freehand drawings, became paintings; and her paintings became our muse. Enriched with color and characters, the details of other characters within other living beings did distorted creatures appear. Her playfulness continued throughout her working approach until this day. However, the contexts changed. From Moulids, to religious rituals, to family gatherings and portraits, Evelyn personalized her most intimate memories shared within her own cultural history to how she identifies them with herself. In this collection, we focused on Evelyn’s most popular works, created from 1989 – 2009, we capture the playfulness and child-like intimacies shared with her personal memory, and in gratitude do we encourage to see a retrospective of all the splendors presented here.