• Tabari Artspace: Forte dei Marmi Residency

    Tabari Artspace: Forte dei Marmi Residency

    Tabari Artspace art gallery has collaborated with the newly renovated boutique hotel, La Serena, in Forte Dei Marmi to launch a revolving gallery space and artist residency.
     
    The hotel-gallery concept forms a platform that will allow visitors to immerse themselves in a revolving exhibition of works by international artists. Beyond its role as a revolving exhibition space, the hotel extends an invitation to artists to take up residence within its walls. The artist residency programme, pioneered by Tabari Artspace, aims to forge connections between ambitious artists, writers, and creatives, providing them with a global platform and inspiring the next generation of artistic visionaries through immersive experiences in stimulating environments.
     
    During their residency, artists can unwind, absorb inspiration, and follow in the footsteps of visionaries such as Michelangelo and Henry Moore, who once sought solace and creativity in Forte dei Marmi. 
     
    We are pleased to welcome Malik Thomas Jalil and Samo Shalaby as our first artists-in-residence at the hotel during summer 2024.
     
    ABOUT SAMO SHALABY

    Samo Shalaby is an Egyptian-Palestinian fine artist based between Dubai and London. Growing up in Cairo and Dubai before pursuing his artistic education at Central Saint Martins, Samo was exposed to a myriad of artistic expressions, styles, and forms of art-making that have shaped his unique creative oeuvre. 

    Exploring fields such as stage design, costume design, and jewellery, Samo began integrating strands of theatrical essence into his work, infused with a distinct dramatic flair. His artistic explorations traverse the styles of antiquity, surrealism, and the grotesque, filtered through his own contemporary and personal lens. His work embodies an inherent fascination with blurring the boundaries between identity, culture, and couture, often through dichotomous narratives that lurk behind beautiful facades. Combining a range of aesthetics and motifs from various decades, Samo crafts new worlds that are familiar yet so far away. Whether on camera or canvas, symbolism and storytelling are crucial elements for conjuring Samo's vision into existence.

     

     ABOUT MALIK THOMAS JALIL

    Malik Thomas Jalil embraces his inner landscapes unabashedly, investigating his relationship to desires through drawing. Examining male human figures, he depicts moist-eyed subjects as unexpected muses, providing a gaze into his own fantasies and continuing traditions of veneration. He explores memory as form, exposing its delicate nature through linear drawing, exploring the relationship between figural and abstract forms.

     

    Core to his material explorations are raw silk and cotton, forming the base layers of his paintings, hand-dyed in Maramiah (sage), a readily available medicinal herb in Amman, Jordan, where he produced these works. Painterly media, such as linseed-soaked charcoal and pastel, is then gesturally applied to the canvases in the form of restricted Arabesque lines, layering up to fleshier strokes of oil paint to form the skeletal basis for the figural narrative. Paying attention to the textural application of paint as much as the composition of the works, Malik reflects on his physical form and memories of relationships through a range of marks.

     

    Compositionally, the paintings move between lived and imagined experiences, exploring temporal visual encounters occurring within public realized space and within the imagination. Referencing the tableau body and intimate interpretation of Mesopotamian clay reliefs, the paintings echo central-figured compositions and structured narrative compositions.