S A A D Q U R E S H I
OPEN STUDIO at O V A D A
23 January – 7 February 2016
Preview: Friday 22 January 2016, 5-7pm
Join artist Saad Qureshi as he opens up his studio at OVADA for an informal exhibition of work in progress. Qureshi is currently working on new body of work as part of an Arts Council England funded Research and Development project. The open studio will be extended into OVADA’s project space to accommodate the new large-scale pieces that Qureshi is currently working on. Visit during opening hours to meet the artist, discuss Qureshi’s practice and to take an exclusive look at his new works.
Qureshi is looking at the relationship between matter and aura in his new body of work – or the physical and the cultural. Qureshi is interested in how something – an object or a place – becomes significant and takes on an importance beyond its physical presence.
The charcoal and red brick dust drawings explore and posit a foreign or possible other world; a speculative space that we can imagine yet never physically experience, since it hovers in the mind, somewhere between the real and the imagined. Some drawn landscapes have great cultural and historical significance, others not. Intentionally drawing attention to these specific places to create a void of attachment, further questioning the importance that the place then holds for the viewer. A series of vast, unpopulated red landscapes, much as one might envision the topographies of some unknown planet. Together, the experience of the space will bring to mind standing on the bridge of a spaceship, from which the viewer looks out on to this world: a place of freedom and new beginnings, or a site of desolation and the unknown? These works are intended to evoke ideas that are both dramatic and sacred, considering the visible and the invisible, the mundane and the supra-mundane.
Open: Thursdays – Sundays, 12-5pm
Admission free
Saad Qureshi Biography
Born 1986.
Since graduating with an MFA from The Slade School of Fine Art in 2010, Qureshi has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally.
Solo shows include Gazelli Art House in London and the Aicon Gallery in New York.
Group exhibitions include the Venice Biennale 2015, Saatchi Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, Royal British Society of Sculptors, the Barbican, Patrick Heide CA, Red Mansion Foundation, Modern Art Oxford, White Project Gallery (Paris), Centrale Montemartini (Rome), and the Museum voor Moderne Kunst (Arnhem).
Selected prizes: Arts Council England Research Award, AHRC Postgraduate Award, the Red Mansion Foundation Prize, and the Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary Award.
Residencies include the BBC2 “School of Saatchi” (London) and the International Art Zone, (Beijing).
Qureshi’s works are held in the Farjam Foundation Collection (Dubai), the Dipti Mathur Collection (California), the Creative Cities Collection (Beijing) and the Boston Consulting Group Collection, as well as other private collections.
Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show in November 2016 at Nunu Fine Art, Taipei, Taiwan, and a group show at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai, India, in March 2016.
Qureshi has recently been awarded the Land Securities NOVA Public art commission, to create a new installation for the public realm in Westminster, London, for September 2016.