Location: Djanogly Gallery, Lakeside Arts, University of Nottingham, Nottingham
Dates: 20 January - 14 April 2024
Award-winning artist Saad Qureshi will present his first UK solo show in four years at the Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham, in Spring 2024. The exhibition includes large-scale sculptural installation alongside a new body of works on paper. The exhibition runs at the same time as the artist’s new site-specific sculpture titled Convocation showing at Raffles London. The work was commissioned by Frieze & The OWO to reflect the diversity of modern Britain and to respond to the grandeur of the former Old War Office in Whitehall.
At Nottingham, Saad will show for the first time a series of thirty-three watercolours he has called Hell is Empty. Startling and humorous, these jewel-like drawings, reminiscent of pages from illuminated manuscripts or tarot cards, imagine the devil as evoked in Islamic theology: a creature of fire, mischief and destruction.
Also, created for his exhibition at the Djanogly are a new series of his Tanabanas. First created by the artist during lockdown, the Tanabanas are woven paper tapestries grounded in domesticity and a long family tradition in craft and needlework. The artist’s grandfather was a tailor in the British Army and brought his family from Pakistan to the UK in the 1950s. Born in Pakistan and raised in Bradford, Saad was brought up in an environment which regarded textiles as objects of skill and artistry. The Tanabanas are created by printing images of textiles onto paper, cutting them into strips and weaving them together to create new abstract compositions. They combine motifs from textiles, architecture and mythology linking Saad’s practice as an artist to generations of makers before him.
Alongside, he is showing his sculptural installation Something about Paradise commissioned for the Chapel at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2020. For this work Saad travelled around the country talking to people of faith (and no faith) about what the concept of Paradise meant to them. The resulting sculptures are towering and sprawling monochrome constructions that combine landscape and architectural features to create fantastical and dreamlike mindscapes. They are accompanied by a series of Gates: thresholds or gateways to the imagined realms of paradise beyond.
All photos by Nick Dunmur
