lilia ben salah is pleased to present « Let's Dance! », Zoulikha Bouabdellah's second solo show at the gallery, from February 1st - March 23rd, 2024. Zoulikha Bouabdellah (1977, Moscow) is a multimedia artist whose work summons icons and dominant representations, especially those of female and male bodies, confronted with socio-political dynamics. This exhibition unveils a corpus of new paintings characterized by vivid color fields, lines, and frontal images of fragmented bodies and imaginary, symbolic forms. The aesthetics of the fragment is dear to Zoulikha Bouadbellah's work and refers thus to the shattering of perception and canonical laws of representation. In her compositions, the body is "sublimated, mutilated, tattooed, experienced, desired, undressed, veiled: the body is poetry."

  • Works

  • Let's Dance!

    By Zoulikha Bouadbellah, January 2024
    Sublimated, mutilated, tattooed, experienced, desired, undressed, veiled: the body is poetry. 

     

    You can act upon the body, whether it's your own or someone else's, whether it's alive or dead, buried or lying, in gestation or in decay; it will house the past, present, and future images of intimacy. 

     

    It is a poetic house made of flesh, bone, and blood. This body has private spaces and other secrets, sides facing the courtyard, garden or street, a central body and extensions, vital functions and superficial ones. 

     

    Like a house, it can smell good or bad. 

     

    With the painting "Diane" (2023), I paraphrase Gaston Bachelard by turning the image of the body into the topography of our intimate being. He suggests, I affirm, through the exercise itself: that of making the body an object and subject at the same time. Taking it, twisting it, looking at it again, fixing it... 

     

    Twenty-four palms do not make a man, contrary to what the Ancients claimed, as if everything was a matter of measure. There are many ways to hide a body. In painting, one can choose not to depict it, blend it into the folds of a veil, precisely trap it between the first and the twenty-fourth palm of a hand. 

     

    On the other hand, embracing the cause of the body requires immoderation, shedding rules, and at a minimum, embodying it, living it, feeling it, penetrating it. Art allows you to do this peacefully, without injury or pain. It allows you to make a body live and kill it. 

     

    That is its power. 

     

    Turned, folded, torn. With the series "Jeu de Jambes" (2023), the body no longer adheres to symmetry. It adopts other lines, other outlines. It balances itself outside of prescription. It's not nudity that I examine, but the terms that define it, caught between freedom and beauty, like house arrest. 

     

    Le Soldat (2023) extends the work that I have been conducting since 2015 with the series of stitched cutouts, Red Thread. It is about deconstructing the body, dynamiting it. 

     

    It is a reversal of the history of the role and place of women in the official history of art: they are no longer images of the male gaze; they are genuine consciousness. 

     

    That is why nudity is free, and its definition of beauty can be explained. 

  • Exhibition views

  • Beaux Arts Magazine n°477, Place aux femmes ! 5 expos gratuites pour découvrir des artistes uniques en leur genre Par...

    Zoulikha Bouabdellah 
    Le bain de Téthys, 2023

    Photo credit © Romain darnaud

     

    Beaux Arts Magazine n°477

    Place aux femmes ! 5 expos gratuites pour découvrir des artistes uniques en leur genre Par Malika Bauwens et Myrtille Mayaud Dequero March 5, 2024

    Des aplats de couleurs vives, des lignes sinueuses, des formes de vie, parfois une jambe ou un sein : ainsi vont les corps de Zoulikha Bouabdellah (née en 1977). Dans ses compositions acidulées, l'artiste franco-algérienne les fait danser par fragments : « sublimé, mutilé, tatoué, éprouvé, désiré, déshabillé, voilé, le corps est poésie », dit-elle. Selon l'artiste, le corps est une maison - à nous de savoir l'habiter. Pour la deuxième fois en France, la galerie Lilia Ben Salah accueille la diplômée des Beaux-Arts de Cergy. Il faut aller rencontrer sa Diane, toile de 2023, où Zoulikha Bouabdellah fait swinguer les empreintes de la paume d'une main, et nous touche. 

    M.B.

    Read full article
  • Press

    Art Frame, By Emna Lakhoua / March 1, 2024

    Exploring the Poetics of Human Form: An Interview with Zoulikha Bouabdellah

    Art Frame

    By Emna Lakhoua / March 1, 2024 Read the full interview on Art Frame