Franklin Parrasch is pleased to present As Above, So Below, the gallery’s first exhibition of works by Kuwaiti artist Latifa Alajlan. In these paintings, Alajlan simultaneously explores Middle Eastern visual idioms while generating her own language and calling hierarchies into question.

Latifa Alajlan’s vernacular has developed from a desire to integrate her cross-cultural experience. Using carefully calculated and rendered patterns which recall common architectural motifs in her native Kuwait - like starred latticework underpaintings, and canvases in the shape of eight-pointed stars - Alajlan establishes a painted ground upon which her own gestural language, which is informed in great part by Western expressive abstraction, coalesces. Each layer – the artist uses both acrylic and oil paints – is applied in response to the last, resulting in a generative push-and-pull that offers a vision of cultural synthesis. 

Throughout her process, as she disrupts the organization of the foundational elements of her paintings with thick, gestural strokes, oil skins, sand, collaged linen, and calligraphic marks, Alajlan considers her own relationship to the legacy of Middle Eastern and Kuwaiti art and artists. In “May Flowers Grow in You” (2024), a richly pigmented, flattened ground erupts with lush curlicues, in teal and lilac and fuchsia, while palpably impasto elements build upon the minimally dimensional surface; Alajlan’s characteristic latticelike underpainting establishes a tempo against which her gestural strokes syncopate. These cascading impasto strokes, nearly Rococo in their lyricism, pull the supremacism of each work’s underpinnings into a tailspin. Likewise, as the palette and surface of “Devotion” (2024) expands and contracts it embodies a vision of reconciliation between the opposing forces of order and integrity of expression. For Alajlan, abstraction is a means of communication. She describes her approach to mark-making as relating to a child “hiding [their] secrets in a playground.” Her process is intuitive and deeply personal; each work’s palette and form expresses the artist’s sensibility, experience, and feelings in a moment. Together, the works in As Above, So Below trace Alajlan’s past and present, and divine a future.