Leila Heller Gallery
Art Dubai 2018

Leila Heller Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in the twelvth edition of Art Dubai with a presentation
in the Contemporary section of the fair.

PRIVATE DAYS (by invitation only)
Monday, March 19, 6.30-8.30pm: Art Dubai Modern Preview
Tuesday, March 20, 3-9.30pm: Art Dubai Preview
Tuesday, March 20, Jumeirah Patrons Preview
Tuesday, March 20, 7pm: The Abraaj Group Art Prize Unveiling

VERNISSAGE (by invitation only)
Wednesday, March 21, 1-4pm: Ladies Day Preview (open to all ladies)
Wednesday, March 21, 4-9.30pm: VIP Opening

PUBLIC DAYS
Wednesday, March 21, 4- 9.30pm
Thursday, March 22, 4-9.30pm
Friday, March 23, 2-9.30pm
Saturday, March 24, 12-6.30pm

Art Dubai Contemporary | Booth A8

For Art Dubai 2018, Leila Heller Gallery is presenting new works from artists including Reza Aramesh, Tara
Donovan, Jacob Hashimoto, Rashid Rana, Kenny Scharf, Sudarshan Shetty, and Philip Taaffe.
Reza Aramesh’s interdisciplinary practice represents the abjection of human bodies sustained during armed
conflict and torture. He blends classical aesthetics with anonymous figures from the contemporary moment,
thereby bringing to the fore the victims who have been rendered invisible, yet at the same time questioning the
traditional representation of suffering throughout the Western art historical canon. For Art Dubai, we will be
showcasing a photographic triptych, depicting Palestinians waiting at the Rafah border point to cross into Egypt
from the Gaza Strip.

Images of oppression and violence have been ubiquitous in Reza Aramesh’s work. This large-scale photographic
tryptich, a format commonly reserved for celebratory purposes continues the artist’s multi-faceted explorations
of the human ability to inflict suffering.

For the last 20 years, Tara Donovan (b. 1969, New York) has used simple, mass produced materials and objects to
explore the transformative effects of accumulation and aggregation. Known for her commitment to process,
Donovan has earned acclaim for her ability to discover the inherent physical characteristics of an object and
transform it into art. Donovan has explored the effects of accumulation with these materials, at times utilizing
hundreds of thousands of units such as straws, pins, or cups to generate perceptual phenomena and subtle
atmospheric effects.

Donovan’s many accolades include the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award (2008) and the first
annual Calder Prize (2005), among others. She has been the subject of several major solo exhibitions at museums
including the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2015); Milwaukee Art Museum (2012); The Metropolitan

Museum of Art (2007), UCLA Hammer Museum (2004), and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1999).
Donovan’s first European exhibition was presented in 2013 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk,
Denmark, and traveled to the Arp Museum Bahnhof, Rolandseck, Remagen, Germany. In September of 2018, her
work will be presented in the solo exhibition Tara Donovan: Fieldwork at Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver.
Trees, clouds, grass, sky: everything dies, except in the art of Jacob Hashimoto, whose gesture toward landscape
only underlies the artifice of its form and the viewer’s contemporary alienation from its function. The artist seeks
to uncover the underlying prismatic influence of the technological on our contemporary understanding of the
tipsy threshold between the natural and artificial within digitalization of experience.

Jacob Hashimoto was born in Greeley, Colorado in 1973 and is a graduate of The School of the Art Institute of
Chicago. He lives and works in Queens, New York. Hashimoto has been featured in solo museum exhibitions at
MOCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Fondazione
Querini Stampalia in Venice, LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Schauwerk Sindlefingen in Germany,
and the Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art in Finland. He has also had solo shows at Mary Boone Gallery in New
York, Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, Studio la Città in Verona, Galerie Forsblom in Helsinki and Anglim
Gilbert Gallery in San Francisco, among others. His work is in the collections of LACMA - Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, EMMA - Saastamoinen Foundation, Schauwerk Sindelfingen, The California Endowment, and
numerous other public collections.

Rashid Rana’s splicing and stitching technique feels violent as it tears apart and reassembles photographs of
canonical art historical and contemporary imagery. Utilising the grid structure, the artist scrambles the famous
compositions and rearranges them into pixelated and codified puzzles. Rana’s Transliteration Series reimagines
pre-existing imagery into digital fields of form and colour that he can play with. Rana’s technique of image-making
is not simply a formal device: it is an act of subversion that literally breaks apart and puts together the original
image that creates a new image telling a different story. The strategy creates intended and unintended pairings
whereby pictorial language from a particular time and place in history finds itself reborn and re-examined through
the lens of another set of spatial and temporal coordinates.

Born in Hollywood, California in 1958, Kenny Scharf lives and works in Los Angeles, California and New York, New York. A muralist, painter, sculptor, and installation artist, best known for his fantastical, large-scale paintings of
anthropomorphic animals and imagined creatures, Kenny Scharf rose to prominence alongside his friends and
contemporaries Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring in the East Village art scene of the 1980s. One of the first
artists to inject elements of street culture into the mainstream of contemporary art, Scharf has continued to
pioneer projects like his Cosmic Cavern—a now legendary all-night DayGlo disco party held in the basement of
a Brooklyn warehouse from 2009-2010. His paintings incorporate imagery from advertisements, cartoons and
classic Americana into exuberant compositions with an underlying subversive edge.

His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions and he has had solo exhibitions at Pasadena Museum
of California Art (2004); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles (2001); Portland Institute for
Contemporary Art (1999); The Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida (1997); University Galleries of Illinois State
University, Normal, Illinois (1997); Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico (1996); and
Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (1995) among other locations around the world.