Ayyam Gallery Damascus will proudly present Witness, the solo show of Syrian artist Rima Salamoun. As the painter’s first exhibition with Ayyam Gallery, Witness will feature over a dozen new works. With their imposing size and haunting subjects, these recent canvases demonstrate Salamoun’s talent for presenting the embodied sorrow of mankind amidst the modern condition.
Psychologically embroiled subjects, men and women who peer into the sky as they anxiously watch an unknown force, steer the pathos of her work. As powerful representations of the plight of humanity, Salamoun maintains the anonymity of her subjects, creating universal narratives from which viewers can grasp the weight of global concerns. She does so with an accomplished command of medium and an apparent capacity for building the dimensionality of her figures as though carefully sculpted. A seemingly sullied application of medium via loose brushstrokes adds to the dramatic appearance of her protagonists as their outlines recede into their ambiguous settings and the emptiness of clouded backgrounds speaks volumes.
Born in Damascus, Syria in 1963, Salamoun graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Damascus University in 1987. A member of the Syrian Syndicate of Fine Arts, she has participated in several collective exhibitions in the Arab world and Europe such as the acclaimed Syrian Contemporary Art at the Waqif Art Center in Qatar and has held a number of solo shows at home and abroad, most notably at Gallery Espace Europia in France. In March 2010 she was featured in Syrian Fine Art Painters a group exhibition held at the UNESCO Palace in Beirut as part of the city’s “World Book Capital” proceedings, where her work was received with an overwhelming response from Lebanese viewers and international art lovers alike. Most recently she has had successful lots in Ayyam Auctions’ public sales.