Preview: ASSUNTA ABDEL AZIM MOHAMED

curated by David Lillington

We are pleased to present Assunta Abdel Azim Mohamed's first solo exhibition in London.
Assunta Abdel Azim Mohamed's drawings are at once a satire of her generation in Vienna and a study of the human condition, a painful moral comedy, with death as the anchoring motif. They are dense with incident and dense with allusion: to music, film, literature and art; to the Baroque and to Symbolism; to medicine, anatomy, the graphic arts and to contemporary popular culture. Vienna is between east and the west and genres meet there, a fact which further influences the work. Mohamed’s intelligence about the nature of drawing and the apparent ease with which she draws, results in work that seems almost self-aware: this is an art of apperception, even while it is about other people’s lives, their ambiguous and unresolved stories.
- David Lillington (2017)

Assunta Abdel Azim Mohamed (b. 1993) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. She studied Romance Studies and then Graphics and Printmaking at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Shortlisted for eleven awards, she has won four of them. She is currently undertaking a commission for a public mural in Vienna. Her works are in private collections in Vienna, Barcelona, London, Berlin, Zürich and Lugano. Selected exhibitions include: Das Leben ist anderswo, Galerie Hilger NEXT, Vienna (solo, 2016); sechs xx sechs, Loft 8, Vienna (2016); Studenski Biennal, Belgrade (2016); Us, them, you, Studio Place Arts Gallery, Barre, Vermont, USA (2016); Curiositas, Galerie Jahidi, Paris (2016); Art Night Venezia, Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, Venice (2015).
An accompanying essay by David Lillington will be available as part of the exhibition.

David Lillington is a writer and curator based in London. He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics and of the Association for the Study of Death and Society. He met Mohamed when she submitted work for his exhibition Death and Dying at MAG3, Vienna in 2014. In May 2017 he presented her work at the conference Death and the Maiden, University of Social Sciences, Łódź, Poland. Recent writings include Death Ltd. for Art Monthly and catalogue essays for the Gallery of Everything (on the collages of Ion Barladeanu) and for Mercer and Chance (on Aude Hérail Jäger’s Sentinels). He presented a paper on Delmore Schwartz at the Death and the Maiden conference, University of Winchester, July 2017.