Samira Abbassy

NYAMA Fine Art is pleased to present Samira Abbassy’s New York art fair debut. The prolific artist presents an overview of her oeuvre with selections of gesso oil paintings and charcoal drawings from her series’ “Embodied Alchemy” (2020-present) and "Chemical Hysterical” (2006-present). Abbassy hybridizes pan-religious iconography,
centering the autobiographical and archetypal female as a universal symbol for resilience, pain, reincarnation, healing and love.
At Canterbury College of Art in Kent, UK, Abbassy fostered a fascination with pre- Renaissance and Byzantine art. Her work melds influences of the Eastern and Western canons, focused first on recovering ancestry through the lens of Persian and Indian miniature. She combines Hindu and Buddhist iconography in parallel with Abrahamic narratives. The stylistic influence of flatness is drawn from 14th-century hagiographies, where the figure of the saint appears many times, charting his journey in the landscape or on a pilgrimage.
Much of Abbassy’s work is guided by the Jungian theory of the “collective unconscious” and fragmented ancestral memory. She uses the idea of multiples of ‘the Self’ to represent the autobiographical through cultural, psychological, and biochemical aspects, in which conflicts and dilemmas become incorporated into the body, or are fragmented by it. It is no wonder then that the figures Abbassy renders are both alien and familiar, haunting
and peaceful, flat and layered. They embody a cognitive dissonance of timeliness and timelessness.
The compositions are corporeal with motifs that mark the passage of time from series to series. For example, the use of mirror and mirror images are a recurrent compositional device, signaling duality. Consider the painting Double Blind, 2020, in which the mirror functions as a psycho-emotional X-ray, emphasizing the tension of reality versus alternate possibility as well as allowing the artist to contextualize herself as belonging. The mirro

Submitted by Nyama Fine Art