Biography
Waddington Custot Dubai is pleased to present A Shared Ground, bringing together a wide-ranging constellation of artists whose practices span generations, geographies, and formal languages. Rather than proposing a single stylistic or thematic framework, the exhibition explores the idea of commonality through difference—how artists working in radically distinct modes arrive at parallel questions about material, gesture, landscape, and the human condition. Across painting, sculpture, and photography, the exhibition suggests that shared ground is not a fixed point of origin, but something continually negotiated through perception, process, and encounter.
A powerful dialogue unfolds between artists who treat painting as an arena of movement and concentration. In Ali Banisadr’s In the name (2008), layered forms and shifting spatial registers create a dense, almost orchestral composition in which abstraction and figuration interweave. This sense of velocity finds an historic counterpart in Georges Mathieu’s Immensité désemparée (1989/90), where calligraphic force transforms the canvas into a theatre of gesture. Material and motion are distilled differently in the practice of Fabienne Verdier, whose works—including L’instant où tombe la nuit (2024) and Voyage d’hiver 3 (2016)—translate natural phenomena into singular, suspended brushstrokes that balance control and release. Likewise, Ian Davenport’s Chromascopic (2014) channels gravity and viscosity into luminous chromatic flows, allowing colour itself to become both subject and structure. In these works, painting becomes an event: an index of time, motion, and embodied perception.
Questions of figuration and human presence emerge through distinct visual languages. In the watercolours Musician and Dancers (2022), Fernando Botero imbues everyday subjects with a sense of monumentality and warmth, transforming intimacy into a timeless archetype. A more poetic and associative sensibility appears in Joan Miró’s Baigneuse de Cala Major (1960), where the body dissolves into a constellation of signs, poised between playfulness and metaphysical space. Sculptural presence anchors this exploration in three dimensions through Sophia Vari’s Black Space (2000), whose patinated bronze form negotiates weight, balance, and the translation of bodily dynamism into abstract volume.
A quieter, contemplative register is found in works that engage landscape as both subject and metaphor. Nick Brandt’s The Cave (2024) confronts viewers with an environment of striking scale, offering a meditation on fragility, stillness, and ecological time. In contrast, Richard Höglund’s Desert Octave II (2016) incorporates marble dust, metals, and pigment into a tactile surface that evokes geological accumulation, suggesting painting as stratified terrain. Landon Metz’s MMXXIV XVIII (2024) reduces form to softened chromatic fields that unfold gradually, inviting sustained looking and an awareness of spatial relationships shaped by repetition and nuance.
Material experimentation forms another essential axis of the exhibition, where objecthood and process take precedence. Jean-François Fourtou’s Dromadaire (2002) merges natural fibre and resin to create a hybrid presence that feels both monumental and disarmingly tactile, blurring boundaries between the familiar and the fantastical. The interplay of craft and cultural memory is central to Joana Vasconcelos’s Lança Perfume series (2021–22), where ceramic forms are enveloped in hand-crocheted lace, collapsing distinctions between fine art, design, and domestic tradition. Industrial precision and conceptual clarity define the practice of Bernar Venet, represented by works such as Bibliothèque Ronde (2020), Banc (Bench) (1998–2019), and the Effondrement prints, in which arcs, lines, and steel structures articulate systems of order and indeterminacy.
