Ben Brown Fine Arts is honoured to present the second solo exhibition of Nabil Nahas at our Hong Kong gallery. The exhibition will feature recent works from the artist's ongoing series of biomorphic, marine-inspired imagery created through textural layers of resplendent colour.
The Lebanese-born artist, who divides his time between New York and Beirut, has always been fascinated by the rhythms, forms and phenomena of the natural world. From his paintings of cedar and palm trees inspired by his childhood homes in Beirut and Cairo to his abstractions of concentric circles and biomorphic fractals to his starfish works, Nahas imparts his reverence for nature and the environments that have profoundly influenced him throughout his life.
In the early 1990s, Nahas was struck by a starfish-strewn beach on Long Island, New York, and he began casting the starfish, as well as shells and other found elements from the seashore, in silicone, creating molds that were then filled with acrylic. His experimental castings proliferated and became a repository for his relief paintings of layer upon layer of organic shapes covered in luminescent, hyperreal colours. Nahas often mixes pumice powder into his paint, further enhancing the materiality of his work, giving the impression of pure ground pigment or coral reefs.