Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde felt there was no need to staple a clever title onto this show of 11 artists, because Nice Drawings came about via a simple request for some of the gallery’s friends and collaborators to send over a new drawing:

Nesa Azadikhah

Niyaz Azadikhah

Abdelkader Benchamma

Ramin Haerizadeh

Rokni Haerizadeh

Nargess Hashemi

Mohammed Kazem

Jessica Mein

Farshid Maleki

Hesam Rahmanian

Haleh Redjaian

The responses were neither conventional or necessarily ‘nice’ drawings: Pencil-like lines areformed in an unthreaded rice bag; bikinied women wrestle on a barren beach of blank paper,(an animation composed of hundreds of hand-drawn frames). A sculptural ink drawing of amauve mountain range reveals its grandeur to be nothing more than a flimsy film set. Nonsensical faux-architectural drawings depict a room in absurd dimensions, shreds offamily photographs are finished and made caustic with graphite, the rigidity of lines on a grid is only a cover for artful errors.

Despite the playful title, each of these artists approaches the act and habit of drawing from aslant perspective, whether it’s finding ways to draw without necessarily ending up with adrawing or turning absent-minded doodling into a private subversion.

Nice Drawings marks 10 years since Isabelle van den Eynde first organised an exhibition in Dubai. The show presents very new work by some of the co-conspirators the gallery hasworked with along the way, and is a friendly sidestep away from overarching concepts orrigorous titles.

Nice Drawings

13 January - 19 February 2015
Preview: 7pm, 12 January 2015

Dubai, UAE

For media requests, please contact Annabel Holt: annabel@ivde.net | +971 (0) 4 323 5052