Leila Heller is pleased to announce “Long Voyage” by Sumayyah Samaha, on view in New York from July 25th to August 31st. In recent paintings and works on paper, Sumayyah Samaha uses oil, charcoal, and watercolor to tell her visual story. With each image, her goal is always to find harmony between these different media and the varied abstract forms that emerge from her playful, gestural approach.
Larger works, like “My 2nd Voyage, 2020”, may hang in Samaha’s live/work studio for months before they are complete. While sweeping, gestural lines in charcoal arc across canvases, Samaha paints, scrapes, erases and repaints the remaining surface with close attention as she develops an interplay between defined and undefined forms. Swaths of flat gradients are beside and behind free-form shapes, all floating upon a white background. Color, which abounds in Sahama’s work, is determined by the type of light she seeks to realize.
Samaha moves back and forth freely across her surfaces, using a vocabulary informed by an artistic career spanning 40+ years and a range of mediums—oil painting, charcoal, watercolor, paper making, ceramics, sculpture, pastels, and installation. She describes this body of work as “free, stream of consciousness painting.”
Press release from Leila Heller NY
