LEEMOUR PELLI | 'MY HEART IS IN MY STOMACH'

January 10th - February 9th, 2009

Daneyal Mahmood Gallery is pleased to exhibit Leemour Pelli’s most recent body of work. Pelli works in the diverse media of painting, sculpture, drawings and prints, aiming at exploring fundamental aspects of human experience, both real and imagined.

The work contains figures that are constricted by, and paradoxically perhaps, thriving on their emotional and physical conditions. They are both subjects and objects of the acts of perception, love, and memory. Metaphorically, reality and the self are often x-rayed. They are delved into, layered, and exposed from the inside out, to reveal what is concealed, suppressed, or difficult to discern. As an expression of the internal and the elusive, some of the characters are rendered with external anatomical organs, or marks and imprints. The figures are ruptured, fragmented and disintegrating, suggesting the inner, imperceptible drama of the characters. The figures become more and more skeletal, at times complete skeletons; being a metaphor for the human condition.

The work draws inspiration from literature and poetry, such as the writings of Samuel Beckett, and Ted Hughes. Characters and personas that may resemble those in some of their writings, like Murphy and Crow, are re-created and used in a theatrical series of works.

Though the work consists of single figures or couples, it may be said that larger issues concerning the break down or malfunctioning of human relations and humanity itself are invoked. A general failure at connection is evident. Indeed, the work is about fundamental collapse: of contemporary social conventions, perceptions, relationships, and individuals' internal and exterior worlds.

Daneyal Mahmood Gallery is very pleased to present Unrevealed by Lisa Ross, a solo exhibition comprised of photographs and video works made at holy sites in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Northwest China.

Lisa Ross's work Concerns itself mainly with memory, temporality and the visual expression of faith. It is on the embodiment of the secular and the sacred that this work relies; a reconceptualization of the corporeal and its interdependence with time and place.

The Solemnity of Ross's aesthetic incites contemplation: narratives, both real and imagined, emerge from her photographs viscerally engaging the viewer in rituals of visitation and gestures of devotion.

Included are two video pieces in which the body merges with the landscape and becomes the vehicle which invites - and desires - that the ephemeral become its own breathing, living entity: the only audible sound that of the wind and flags blowing in the desert.

Impermanence becomes tangible as the language of these works unfolds, then retracts. It is affirmed tha life and death are never finite; that the articulation of grief - as well as transcendence - is a collective experience. Unrevealed disarms the notion that trajectories may have only one beginning and one end.

(Sherisse Alvarez)

About Leemour Pelli:

As the artist often explores the human condition & the difficult things that exist in life. In some of her work, Pelli focuses on manifesting not only what the eye can see - but what one can not see. The work is about limitations - of vision and perception.

All of the paitings are almost like medical charts or surgical operations, where the artist tries to expose & diagnose things, study them, cure them, fix, understand or just wallow in them.

One Person Exhibitions

2008 Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, "My Heart Is In My Stomach", New York, NY

2005 Annina Nosei Gallery, "Recent Paintings", New York, NY

2005 The Icehouse Gallery, "Love" Said God Say "Love", Greenport, New York

2005 Flying Space, "Love," said God, say "Love," Sag Harbor, New York

2004 Annina Nosei Gallery, "From the Heart", New York, NY

2003 The Art Gallery of the University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida

2000 ArtCore Gallery, "Skins", Toronto, Canada

Selected Group Exhibitions

2007 Kinz, Tillou and Feigen Gallery, "By Invitation Only" (May 19-June 30th, 2007)

2007 Pro Arts, "Happily Ever After", Jersey City, New Jersrey (Sept. 21-Oct. 20) curated by Debra Jenks

2007 Heskin Contemporary Gallery, "Anatomical Attitudes", New York, NY (March 14-April 28th) curated by Robin Reisenfeld

2006 Scope New York, Annina Nosei Gallery (March 10-13)

2006 Rocket Projects, "The Social Body, Miami", Florida (April)

2006 Kashya Hildebrand Gallery, "Woman": Self-Portrait" (June 1st-July 1st)

2006 Supreme Trading, "Native Spirit", New York, NY (March 24-April 30th)

2006 Silas Marder Gallery, Bridgehampton, New York (May)

2005 Flying Space, "Bedtime Stories", Sag Harbor, New York (May 22-June 30)

2005 Spaces, "Beautiful Dreamer", Cleveland, Ohio (September 9th - October 31)

2005 Scope Miami, "Step 1", Ombretta Agro and Rena Glickman (December)

2004 Riva Gallery, "Beautiful Grotesque", New York (Curated by David Gibson)

2004 Brooklyn Fireproof, "Intimacy", (Curated by David Gibson)

2003 Paul Rodgers Gallery, "Pandora's Wink", Orly Cogan, Leemour Pelli,

2003 Jenny Toth, New York

2003 Scope Miami, Paul Rodgers Gallery, (December)

2003 Gangneung Cultural Art Center, Gangneung City, Korea (October, 2003)

2003 PS1 Institute of Contemporary Art, "After Matisse/Picasso", New York

2003 Nurture Art, "Id Entity", Williamsburg, New York

2002 Red Dot Gallery, "Living With Art", New York, NY

2002 Matthew Izzo Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

2002 The Freight Elevator Project, Brooklyn, New York (curated by Ombretta Agro)

2001 Artcore, Toronto, Canada

2001 The Freight Elevator Project Downtown Arts Festival, New York

2001 C.S.V.Center, "The Body or the Landscape", NewYork (curated by David Gibson)

2000 "Insites: Interior Spaces in Contemporary Art", Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion, Stamford, Connecticut

2000 Artcore, Toronto, Canada

2000 Substance, "Neoimages", New York (curated by Robert Heckes)

2000 "Duchamp Traveling Exhibition", The New York Arts Magazine Collection

2000 Bahnhof Kunsthalle, Bremen, Germany

2000 Emanuel Heller Gallery, Tel-Aviv, Israel

2000 The Artist's Museum, Lodz, Poland, Venice Biennial

2000 The Gallery of Social and Political Art, "Sex, Sexism and Society", Boston., MA

1999 Jonathan Feldschuh and Leemour Pelli, Hartnett-Murray Gallery, New York

1999 Artcore Gallery,"New Drawing", Toronto, Canada

1999 Stephen Gang Gallery, "Cross Cultural Voices: Between Memories", New York, NY (in conjunction with the Asian American Art Center)

1999 Gale Gates Gallery, "Size Matters", Brooklyn (curated by Mike Weiss)

1999 A Millennium of Memory, The New York Law School

1998 Stefan Stux Gallery, New York

1998 Artcore Gallery, Toronto, Canada

Catalogues

2007 Heskin Contemporary Gallery, "Anatomical Attitudes", New York (March) by Robin Reisenfeld

2006 "Annina Nosei Gallery 2003-2006" (December, 2006)

2005 "Beautiful Dreamer", Spaces, Cleveland, Ohio (by David Gibson)

2003 "Leemour Pelli: Paintings and Drawings", The Art Gallery of the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Text: Kevin Haran and David Gibson

2003 The 4th Shinsaimdang Art Festival, New York-Paris Artists Exhibition, Gangneung, Korea (Oct, 2003)

2000 "Insites: Interior Spaces in Contemporary Art", Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion

2000 "Cross Cultural Voices: Between Memories", Asian American Arts Center and the Stephen Gang Gallery, New York

Public Collections

The Art Gallery of the University of Central Florida, Orlando