Khaled Takreti: LOL

Ayyam Gallery Dubai (DIFC) is pleased to announce LOL, the solo show of influential Syrian artist Khaled Takreti. Highlighting Takreti’s latest body of work, the exhibition travels to Dubai after a highly successful debut at Ayyam Gallery’s Beirut outpost in September 2014, where a new monograph on the artist was simultaneously launched. 

LOL demonstrates Takreti’s recent innovations in painting through a methodical process that involves multiple stages of executing his compositions. In each work, the artist begins with appropriated or photographic imagery then creates a stencil that serves as the outline of his subjects as he renders an ‘etching’ on the sparse background of untreated canvas. Resembling facsimiles of advertisements or print media, Takreti isolates his figures with inanimate objects or minimally described settings as he emphasises the flattening of space that one associates with mass-produced imagery. Select areas of colour guide the viewer across the composition, amplifying the symbolism of a certain figure or object. In 220 Volts (2014), for example, a woman’s head has been transformed into a red and black speaker, her body covered in thin lines that give the appearance of a transmitted image as its signal is adjusted. Taken by surprise, the figure stands to the side of outdated communication devices and stereo equipment as Takreti playfully satirises the high level of dependency on electronic goods and media that defines the modern experience.