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28.03 - 05.05 2024
Opening
Thursday March 28th from 5 - 8 pm

No Man’s Art Gallery is honoured to present ANTSONG, Maxim Santalov’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Extending to both gallery spaces, ANTSONG shows the artist’s large body of intricately composed geometrical drawings that form a narrative of a rhythmic trail, moving through the planetary mesocosms of Santalov’s worlds. He reconstructs childlike reveries of the past, searching for their elements and atmospheres in the future. 

“My work is my own insectarium, filled with vanishing species and unidentifiable creatures,” Santalov poses. Through his signature technique, he highlights the juxtaposition of the modern and the rural, the adult and the childlike, the harsh and the soft - while creating a need for motion, for a search and a pathway, amongst wandering insects, the dripping waters, falling stars and the explosive fires. 

Prickling past the surface of his cultural memory, Santalov builds pheromonal bridges ‒ just as those blossomed by his ant-characters ‒ to connect various themes emerging within the landscape of Russian art history to his unique integration of realism and surrealism. Touching the array of values and principles embedded in movements such as Constructivism and Suprematism, as well as his own Ävangraphics. Santalov masters the rigidity of minimal shapes and their carved-out dimensionality along with a contrasting intensity and vibrancy of his colour palette. In his self-taught practice, the artist moves across from concealment directly into mapping, marking, and reeking storytelling. “At first glance, it may seem as if my drawings are devoid of air, but look more closely. The work is marked with scratches and ripples which impose shape and texture. Space binds together the elements of composition,” Santalov explains. 

As symbols of symbiotic relationships, the techniques used by the artist are left within their own capsules of existence, communicating with each other and the viewer as the trails left behind. The yellow acrylic under the layers of wax crayon and pencil markings remain visible, tying the echoing niches of Santalov’s drawing environment to his methodology. As such, the artist simultaneously enchants with an arthropodic cosmos and leaves space for narratives of our own fabrication, memory, and emotion.

The exhibition extends to both gallery locations: Willem de Zwijgerlaan 327 and Bos en Lommerweg 88 and runs until May 5th 2024. For more information or inquiries please contact info@nomansart.com

Photos Tommy Smits

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Anna Vosse Carpaij | Lotus Rosalina Hebbing
Matei Dragomir | Obbe van der Weide
Toran Macrae Wolstencroft

22.11 - 23.12 2023

Opening
Wednesday November 22nd from 4 - 6 pm
Location: NMAG, Bos en Lommerweg, 88, Amsterdam

jiuba art space presents Wormhole Echoes. In Roman mythology, Janus, the god with two heads, embodies the dual nature of holding conflicting ideas. A symbol of beginnings and endings, doorways, openings and time; the plurality of openings highlighting the freedom of choice. Wormhole Echoes is an exploration beyond the confines of our chosen perspectives, echoing duality and it inspires us to seek a deeper understanding of the universe and our place within it.

jiuba art space is an is an offshoot of No Man’s Art Gallery, providing a space for spontaneous, joyful and experimental programming on an informal basis with young and emerging artists. As a mostly online space, jiuba will function as an accessible art marketplace that will have occasional physical expressions such as this show.

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Nadie BorGgreve | Julia Dahee hong | Afra Eisma
Alejandra LÓpez Martínez | Marnix van Uum

22.11 - 23.12 2023

Opening
Wednesday November 22nd from 4 - 6 pm
Location: NMAG Kiosk, Willem de Zwijgerlaan, 327, Amsterdam

In the midst of winter’s solace, and the need for i-love-you’s, No Man’s Art Gallery presents the group exhibition suckle and squeeze. This friendship, this friendly-ship, that vessel in which I camouflage. Their arms warm to hold me, boundaries bound anew as my body is boarded. I’m melted into a confusing mixture; home. Outside it’s no different, in a circle – our arms one. ‘Do not remove your lovely leopard spots’, she said. We squeezed milk in each other's mouth as they came out.

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Listen back to the artist talk with artist Sam Samiee and director/curator Lih-Lan Wong
NMAG Storage Sessions I

08.09 - 29.10. 2023

No Man’s Art Gallery proudly presents When Hell Breaks Loose I’ll Tell You Your Legs Were Always On My Mind the first solo exhibition by Sam Samiee at the gallery. Across his multifaceted career as a painter, essayist and psychoanalyst in-training, this exhibition specifically highlights the artist’s sixteen-year engagement in drawing, emphasising the prioritisation of queer aesthetics throughout vulnerabilities and crises.

The rooms of No Man’s Art Gallery show over two-hundred rarely exhibited drawings - spanning from 2008 - 2023 - that are thematically divided into landscape and flora, imaginative scenes, figuration and still life. The title of the exhibition alludes to an overarching theme throughout the artist's artistic and research-based endeavours: voicing a poetic eroticism or playfulness in the light of crises.

Samiee refers to his practice as post-cinematic. Central to his practice are installations embedded within the architecture of the exhibition space. The way they are edited relate to the process of playing with semantics. An example of this is seen in relation to his models, friends and conversants, revealing a deep connection of shared moments and dialogue that influenced sensual, political and relational elements guided by the artist's long involvement in psychoanalytic settings and thinking.

While Samiee separates and engages independently with drawing as a rationalist enterprise of measuring and recording the real world, his other endeavour, poetry and deconstruction of language, intertwines as subject matter of the drawings. Drawing and visual arts are put to work to materialise notions, concepts and abstract constellations that have seemingly lost their touch with materiality. Finding life-driven forces within situations that are deadening; finding a playfulness at the moment of drawing still life, machines and objects of everyday life; envisioning familiar and unfamiliar landscapes of mountains and lowlands, and collecting thoughts and ideas for a future view. Through the unique installation of the drawing archive, new connections appear between nodal points of the works.

His drawings breathe life into verses from poetry, figures from world mythology, and his own lines, avoiding mere literary illustration. An abstract scene of a lover's embrace is interlaced with a written fragment of Mohammad Reza Sharjarian's "A Lover's Plight," a Persian song calling on lovers to pour their hearts into their cups like tulips blushing. Samiee's recurring exploration of the connection between a verse of poetry and drawing or painting such as in his use of the promethean motif, leads to fresh interpretations and interconnectedness among these semantic points.

Amid over two hundred drawings we find scenes of mourning, death, the crucifixion and Iran-Iraq war tragedies yet always with the presence of the sanctuary that is beauty. The drawings invite access to the subtext of Samiee’s oeuvre, as amongst the chaos it is the beautiful thighs, chests, the Mountains Zagros Ranges and the blossoming orchid branch that offer solace.

Seen from a chronological point of view, and if compared with the exhibiting trajectory of the artist, one is able to observe how Samiee challenges literary hegemony within his culture and others by infusing architecture, physicality, color, and line into a playful discourse. His work exposes and puts on trial ideologies that regulate bodies, allowing both himself and viewers to confront the material reality of his subjects. In his more recent drawings, an embrace of the decorative and the poetic become increasingly visible.

When Hell Breaks Loose I'll Tell You Your Legs Were Always On My Mind reveals a decade of the backstage of the artist practice, research, obsessions, tests and notes which hold together a wide range of emotions, fantasies, and ideas that Samiee has relied on or will return to in the future of his ongoing explorations.

The opening is followed by NMAG’s 5 Year Anniversary Party from 9pm onwards. Join the celebration at Bos & Lommerweg 88 with cocktails and music late into the night.

Public Programme:
Artist Talk | Sam Samiee in conversation with Lih-Lan Wong
When: Thursday October 26th 2023
Time: 6pm - 8pm
Location: NMAG & de bar, Bos en Lommerweg 88-90, Amsterdam

Painter, essayist and psychoanalyst in training Sam Samiee will give an artist talk in conversation with director and curator Lih-Lan Wong.

RSVP to Artist Talk (free admission)

Sam Samiee (b. 1988, IR) is a painter, essayist and psychoanalyst in training based in Amsterdam, Berlin and Tehran. He is a winner of the Royal Award for Painting in 2016 and Wolvecamp Prize in 2018 and finished the Rijksakademie residency in 2015 and ArtEZ University of Arts and Design in 2013, where he was a lecturer of painting until 2020. Samiee synthesises his heavy research on art history, Persian poetry and psychoanalytic theories into a studio practice that employs painting in multiple registers. The characteristic of his installations as extended paintings is the break from the tradition of flat painting and a return to the original question of how artists can represent the three-dimensional world in the space of painting as a metaphor for a set of ideas. He employs a range of painterly attitudes from oil paintings to iPad paintings, figuration, abstraction, the break of the rectangular frame and usage of text among other methods. Recently Samiee’s work focuses on a period of painting that parted ways from avant-garde, with the emphasis on decorative modes of work, of artists such as Matisse and Bonnard.

Graphic Design: Peter van den Hoogen (Coup)

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Anico mostert | Anna van der Ploeg | Cihad Caner | Donglai Meng | Esther van der Heijden & Nosh neneh | kelvin Dijk | Merijn KaVelaars | Safira Taylor | Sam Samiee | Sisse Holst Pedersen | Tommy Smits

Atari
A group exhibition by jiuba art space, hosted at No Man’s Art Gallery
Curated by Sophie Huijbregts
21 July - 27 August 2023

No Man’s Art Gallery is proud to present Atari, a group exhibition that brings together 12 artists whose work inhabits a state of atari: a moment suspended in time, in which the next move must be made. Atari invites us to visit a series of crossroads, touching on topics of interconnectedness and competition, precarity and growth.

In the ancient game of Go, the concept of atari refers to a situation in which a stone is left with only one remaining liberty, or one empty intersection adjacent to the stone. It occurs when a stone’s liberties are reduced to one, caused by the position of the opponent’s stones - meaning the player is faced with the imminent loss of their stone and territory. Therefore, their next move directly and consciously impacts the further path of the game. They can make several strategic decisions, such as defence, counterattack and sacrifice. By recognising atari and responding appropriately, players can either secure their stones' safety or capitalise on their opponent's position to gain an advantage in the game.

Being in a state of atari requires us to hold the weight of all possible paths forward in a single moment: it is a state of contemplation. This is beautifully illustrated in works such as those by Anico Mostert and Donglai Meng. They are meditations, showing us hope and fear and highlighting the multifaceted nature of the human response to risk. At the same time risk can be seen as a catalyst for change, as we can recognise in the works by Sisse Holst Pedersen and Esther van der Heijden. They fuse resilience with fragility, communicating on interconnectedness and growth.

Atari entails the imminent loss or potential gain of territory. This tension evokes a sense of vulnerability, speaking to the role of physical space in the construction of identity and ideas of belonging. In Studies in Cartography, Sam Samiee investigates the power structures at play in the seemingly neutral practice of mapping, drawing attention to the violence underlying this act of capture through imagemaking. It works to render places and peoples legible, defining sets of hierarchies and relationships through which authority can be exerted. If mapping defines territory to impose structures of power, the transgression of those boundaries can be seen as a threat to that same power. Cihad Caner delves further into the construction of the “other” in relation to processes of migration, illustrating how movement through territory puts pressure on ideas of the self. He focuses on water as a driving ecological and political force, as well as a space of flux and uncertainty. Flows of people give rise to anxieties around belonging, their mobility eroding false notions of permanence and stability. 

As the moment in which a path must be chosen, atari is also a state of suspension and uncertainty. Kelvin Dijk’s work grapples with the interplay between migration and identity on a personal level, addressing internal feelings of displacement. Through the exploration of (visual) culture and lore, he attempts to connect different localities and create new modes of cultural belonging. A similar act of anchoring oneself in the face of uncertainty can be found in Anna van der Ploeg’s abstractions of Cape Town’s “missing” posters. They are highly localised communications, as an anonymous author sends out a cry for help to those sharing an urban landscape. These strategies can be seen as acts of tracing, of rendering visible networks and connections across space and time. Similarly, Tommy Smits’ works are a testimony to one of many possible paths taken. They embody a series of uncertainties, a chain reaction of decisions made by chance, memorialising each one as fossils in stone.

If the situation at hand is dealt with strategically, atari represents the possibility for gain or growth. Living Monuments of the Deep, a collaborative project between Esther van der Heijden and Nosh Neneh, makes a case for applying such contemplation and awareness to our relationship with the natural world. The works seek to embody the vulnerability of endangered oceanic species, and invite us to cherish the vast interconnectedness of the world we inhabit. In a similar vein, Safira Taylor combines personal histories with fluid interpretations of the vulnerability, growth and interdependence which characterise many organic processes. This cyclical nature can be recognised in Merijn Kavelaar’s 4Flux, which revisits canvasses from past creative processes to fuel new artistic growth.

Atari marks the launch of jiuba art space, a new (online) space for experimentation and play. jiuba is an offshoot of No Man’s Art Gallery, providing a space for spontaneous, joyful and experimental programming on an informal basis with young and emerging artists. As a mostly online space, jiuba will function as an accessible art marketplace that will have occasional physical expressions such as this show.

Atari will be on show from July 22nd until August 27th. The exhibition extends across both gallery locations: No Man’s Art Gallery KIOSK (Willem de Zwijgerlaan 327), open Wednesday through Saturday, 12 - 5pm. No Man’s Art Gallery & de bar (Bos en Lommerweg 88): open daily, 12 - 5pm.

Programme:

Guided tour with curator Sophie Huijbregts and artists
Location: No Man’s Art Gallery KIOSK, Willem de Zwijgerlaan 327
When: Thursday, August 24th
Time: 6 - 10 PM

More info: Very Small Feelings at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art