Driss Ouadahi

Dubai | 06/02/2012 to 14/03/2012

Driss Ouadahi takes as his subject matter the built environment of urban alienation - sterile modernist public housing developments, wire netting and underground passageways. Ouadahi paints works of paradoxical beauty using this stark urbanism as his springboard.

Currently Ouadahi works in three milieu- landscapes, fences and underpasses. Persistent in each are his core concerns of geometric abstraction, transparency and the implication of the veil.

His large formal landscapes are montages of spaces and places he knows, with human-scale details often omitted. His labyrinthine layering of planes creates space and perspective that is both familiar and confusing. The accuracy Ouadahi's execution belies the fragility of the structures he paints. Ouadahi's fences recall the wire-netting common in the metropolitan suburbs of France and Algeria. They delimit zones into which entrance is not permitted and demarcate privileged zones. Ouadahi's underpasses are the most illusionistic and are based on actual subways in Germany.

Born in Casablanca, Morocco, of Algeria parents in 1959, Driss Ouadahi grew up in Algeria. He studied at the Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts d'Alger before enrolling and subsequently graduating from the Kunstakadamie Düsseldorf, the city where he now lives and works. Ouadahi has exhibited in solo exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Düsseldorf, Germany, and Istres, France. He has also taken part in a number of group exhibitions, most recently in Le Retour, 3ème Festival International d'Art Contemporain d'Alger; Magreb: Dos Orillas, Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid; Future of a Promise at Venice Bienale 54, Cairo Biennial 12, and CU Art Museum, University of Colarado in Boulder.

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