Exhibition · Anat Ebgi · Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES—Anat Ebgi is pleased to present the gallery’s fifth solo exhibition with New York-based Palestinian-American artist Jordan Nassar. The exhibition, entitled Describing Clouds, is on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd from September 19 through October 31. An opening reception will be held with the artist on Saturday, September 19, 6-8 pm. Describing Clouds brings together new multi-panel embroidered landscapes and Smalti tile mosaics that continue Nassar’s engagement with the art and craft histories of the Levant. The exhibition considers how images and techniques move through time as they are repeated, translated, fragmented, and reconfigured across centuries and continents. This exhibition presents a new series of multi-panel embroideries that expand his distinctive engagement with Palestinian tatreez, a traditional form of cross-stitch embroidery most often found on pillows, clothing, and other domestic arts. Geometric panels—diamonds, squares, pentagons, and hexagons—combine patterned fields of repeating motifs with panels depicting imagined landscapes, where hills and horizons emerge through subtle changes in color. Designed to be installed in multiple configurations, the works look to the convertible etched-mirror sculptures of Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, which brought traditional Persian craft techniques and Islamic geometric patterning into dialogue with modern Abstraction and Minimalism. Nassar similarly engages modular structures: individual stitches accumulate into complex patterned landscapes, and distinct panels into larger compositions. While each of the thousands of stitches remain fixed, the relationships among the panels can be changed into different arrangements, allowing the landscapes to be continually reconfigured. Adaptive and evolving, his works are rooted in a linguistic and geopolitical field of play characterized by both conflict and unspoken harmony. A large mosaic tile work, titled Jabalia, draws directly from the…